.. HTML version generated with rst2html -t README > README.html ============== Brioche Backup ============== :Author: Amand Tihon :Contact: :Version: 1.0 :Date: Jan 5th, 2008 :Copyright: GNU GPL, see copyright file. Abstract ======== Brioche is yet another backup shell script. Its main features are - Full and differential backups - LVM snapshots - Xen+paravirt oriented (somehow) - Soon: Upload to a distant FTP server. Rationale ========= Large numbers of backup solutions are freely available today, but when playing with incremental or differential backups, most of them rely on some filesystem capabilities, like *hard-linking*. If the only remote location available to store the backups is an FTP server, this is not a solution. Brioche relies on GNU tar's ``--listed-incremental`` option to create *real* differential [#diff]_ archives. A second feature that makes Brioche interresting is the ability to use LVM snapshots. In the case of a Xen setup where the domUs use logical volumes as partitions, Brioche is able to backup everything from the dom0. .. [#diff] Each differential backup is based upon the last *full* backup, unlike incremental, which are based upon the last (full or incremental) backup. Getting Brioche =============== You can download the tarball from http://www.alrj.org/projects/brioche or get the latest development version with the following git command:: git clone http://git.alrj.org/git/brioche.git Installation ============ Copy the three files ``brioche``, ``brioche.conf`` and ``briochetab`` where you like, and set the ``CONFIG_FILE`` variable in the ``brioche`` script accordingly. If needed, run ``chmod +x /path/to/brioche``. Using Brioche ============= Configuration ------------- Edit the file ``brioche.conf`` to suit your needs. Each option is commented inline and will be detailed here. BACKUPTAB Full absolute path to the briochetab file. This file describes which logical volumes and partitions must be backed up. Its format is explained in the `Defining backups`_ section. MAILTO When the job is done, Brioche will send a summary of the operations by email. You can set it to any value that your ``mail`` command understands. .. _REPODIR: REPODIR Brioche will store all the generated archives in this directory.Note that before doing a full backup, Brioche will move all previous archives into an "undo" subdirectory, which will be removed only if the backup is successful. Make sure there's enough free space on the device where REPODIR is located. USAGE_WARN The report email will include a warning if the space used on REPODIR goes beyond the given threshold. The value must be an integer. COMPRESS This directive allows to specify the compression method to apply to the archives. Possible values are "gz", "bz2" and "lzma". **Warning** : lzma may not be available with older versions of GNU tar. TAR_OPTS Additionnal options that you may want to pass to tar. A typical value could be ``"--one-filesystem -S"``. The first option will skip all other mointpoints (very usefull if you have /dev, /proc, /sys or REPODIR mounted under a device that must be archived). The second one will try to deal with sparse files. SNAPSHOT_MOUNTPOINT Sets the directory where the temporary LVM snapshots must be mounted. SNAPSHOT_NAME The name to use for the snapshot volumes. SNAPSHOT_SIZE Set the size of the snapshot volume. The same suffix than for lvcreate(8) are available. USE_FTP Still TODO. Defining backups ---------------- The backups are defined in the file ``birochetab``. Here is a typical example for a Xen config where cottman is the dom0 and syrtis, kadarin, valeron are domUs :: # Partition or LV Snapshot Host name Volume name # --------------------------------------------------------------- / no cottman root /usr no cottman usr /dev/vg00/valeron-root yes valeron root /dev/vg00/kadarin-root yes kadarin root /dev/vg00/kadarin-home yes kadarin home /dev/vg00/syrtis-root yes syrtis root /dev/vg00/syrtis-home yes syrtis home /dev/vg00/syrtis-usr yes syrtis usr /dev/vg00/syrtis-var yes syrtis var Blank lines, or lines beginning with # are ignored. The first column defines the directory or logical volume to backup. In this example,the first two lines are plain directories, while the other ones point to LVM devices. The second column specify if the backup should be taken from an LVM snapshot or not. It **must** be set to "no" for the backup of a directory and to "yes" for the backup of a logical volume. The last two columns are more or less cosmetic, and define where the archive files will be stored, and how they'll be named. The destination directory will be created under the REPODIR_, and its name will be the value on the third column. Inside this directory, archive files will be named from the value given in the fourth column. For instance, a full and a differential backup for valeron would lead to the following structure :: user:/REPODIR$ ls -l valeron/ total 356544 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 363545613 Jan 3 03:10 root.full.20090103.tar.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 504722 Jan 3 03:10 root.full.snar -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 504725 Jan 4 04:06 root.incr.20090104.snar -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 160542 Jan 4 04:06 root.incr.20090104.tar.bz2 Running Brioche --------------- Brioche understands the following arguments: -f, --full Do a full backup (by default, brioche will do a differential). -h, --help Show a very limited help. When everything is ready, execute the ``brioche`` script as root. The script is pretty verbose, so don't panic if you see lots of lines scrolling in your terminal. By default, Brioche will try to make differential backups, but will gracefully fall back and do a full backup if none is available. If all is fine, it can be added in the system crontab. Here's a suggestion for weekly full backup on Sunday, with differential during the weekdays :: # Daily incremental backup 30 3 * * 1-6 /usr/local/bin/brioche > /var/log/backup.`date "+%a"`.log 2>&1 # Weekly full backup on Sunday 30 3 * * 0 /usr/local/bin/brioche -f > /var/log/backup.`date "+%a"`.log 2>&1 The output of the script will be saved in /var/log/backup.DOW.log with DOW being the abbreviated day of the week (see man date(1) for the format). Bug reporting ============= There's no bugtracker for this project, your bug reports should be sent to the author : Amand Tihon . Please include as much information as possible in your report. References ========== - GNU tar documentation : http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/ - LVM documentation and links : http://sourceware.org/lvm2/