Author Topic: Configure multiple full daily backups  (Read 1522 times)

otoh

  • Zen Apprentice
  • *
  • Posts: 34
  • Karma: +1/-0
    • View Profile
Configure multiple full daily backups
« on: March 18, 2013, 12:55:43 pm »
I need to organise backup of my Zentyal server - it will have maybe 500GB data so a remote backup isn't really feasible, so I will be doing it to USB drives.

Being a bit paranoid about backups, the way I have always backed up important servers is to maintain 5 backup disks, one for each (working) day. The correct disk is connected each day and I maintain a full backup on each one. The others are kept elsewhere - so this way I have multiple off-site backups, and even if something disastrous happened on-site, I should only lose a day.

From what I can tell, the built in backup on Zentyal will not support this - just a single backup destination. Is there any way of persuading it to support multiples? Or does anyone have a suggestion for a different solution?

Sam Graf

  • Guest
Re: Configure multiple full daily backups
« Reply #1 on: March 18, 2013, 01:20:30 pm »
Zentyal can probably be persuaded to do many things that it doesn't do out of the box, but I more or less gave up the hacking approach in the late '80s, after it stopped being fun. :-[

Anyway, my Zentyal backup paranoia took a little different shape. Since I had a NAS device available, I used that as the backup destination for multiple servers. I backed up the NAS to multiple USB drives which went off site. I wasn't doing full daily backups, but I'm supposing I could have.

For what it's worth.

otoh

  • Zen Apprentice
  • *
  • Posts: 34
  • Karma: +1/-0
    • View Profile
Re: Configure multiple full daily backups
« Reply #2 on: March 18, 2013, 04:51:54 pm »
Zentyal can probably be persuaded to do many things that it doesn't do out of the box, but I more or less gave up the hacking approach in the late '80s, after it stopped being fun. :-[

Many thanks for the reply. I know the feeling... although confess that having recently switched my main desktop OS from Mac to Linux, I'm quite enjoying hacking it a bit to get it just how I like :)

Anyway, my Zentyal backup paranoia took a little different shape. Since I had a NAS device available, I used that as the backup destination for multiple servers. I backed up the NAS to multiple USB drives which went off site. I wasn't doing full daily backups, but I'm supposing I could have.

As to the full daily backups - they don't have to be full, incremental is fine - but as long as I have multiple complete backups. The NAS is a good idea, but I'm trying to cut down on the amount of hardware I have knocking around, so am keen not to add more.

My current best thinking, then, is to add another drive in my server and use the Zentyal backup onto it doing a daily incremental - that covers the most likely problems of either disk failure or accidental deletion of stuff. Then I can do something with rsync and cron to manage the external drive backups, which can then be take offsite.

But I'm always interested in different strategies, and how folk handle their backups - so any other ideas, please share! :)

half_life

  • Bug Hunter
  • Zen Hero
  • *****
  • Posts: 867
  • Karma: +59/-0
    • View Profile
Re: Configure multiple full daily backups
« Reply #3 on: March 19, 2013, 02:14:45 am »
If you use the same mount point for each disk you can achieve what you are after.  If duplicity doesn't find its index files from the last full backup,  it will do a full backup regardless of whether or not you had requested an incremental.  If you erase the disk contents before the next rotation into the machine for backup the pattern will continue.  What is the rate of change in your dataset?  Is it files or is it a database?

otoh

  • Zen Apprentice
  • *
  • Posts: 34
  • Karma: +1/-0
    • View Profile
Re: Configure multiple full daily backups
« Reply #4 on: March 19, 2013, 08:47:23 am »
If you use the same mount point for each disk you can achieve what you are after.  If duplicity doesn't find its index files from the last full backup,  it will do a full backup regardless of whether or not you had requested an incremental.  If you erase the disk contents before the next rotation into the machine for backup the pattern will continue.  What is the rate of change in your dataset?  Is it files or is it a database?

Many thanks for the reply, much appreciated. I think my subject was slightly misleading in that I don't necessarily need a full backup each time, but I do need multiple full sets (ie not requiring multiple disks to restore a full backup) - but either way, while you were replying, I was experimenting and you are absolutely right, it works just as I'd like :)

In the backup module, it seems like Zentyal caches the manifest of the last backup it performed, so you can search it. But it doesn't use that to do the next incremental - it uses the actual media at the mountpoint. So if the last backup was to the Monday disk and I have Tuesday connected to the mountpoint, it will report files that aren't on the Tuesday backup - but when it actually does the backup, it will scan the connected disk and do an incremental from the previous time (eg the last Tuesday) that disk was used.

If, say, the Tuesday disk is connected but not run yet and I want to restore from it, the backup manifest in the web interface can be updated with:
Code: [Select]
/usr/share/zentyal-ebackup/update-status
And, for reference (this is to be found elsewhere, I think), backups can be triggered manually with:
Code: [Select]
/usr/share/zentyal-ebackup/backup-tool --full
/usr/share/zentyal-ebackup/backup-tool --incremental

Again, many thanks - one more job ticked off!

Sam Graf

  • Guest
Re: Configure multiple full daily backups
« Reply #5 on: March 19, 2013, 01:36:51 pm »
If you use the same mount point for each disk you can achieve what you are after.

I learned something. My only other experience in a Linux context was that device B was not a valid destination for backup job A. I don't know what the underlying backup package was in that case.