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Backup-manager is a tool creating backups and storing them locally. It’s really usefult to keep a regular backup of a quickly-changing trees of files (like a development environment) or for traditional backups if you have a NFS mount on your server. Backup-managers is also able to send backup itself to another server by FTP.
In order to verify the backups created by backup-manager, we will use also Backup Checker (stars appreciated 🙂 ), the automated tool to verify backups. For each newly-created backup we want to control that:
- the directory wip/data exists
- the file wip/dump/db.sql exists and has a size greater than 100MB
- the files wip/config/accounts did not change and has a specific md5 hash sum.
Installing what we need
We install backup-manager and backup checker. If you use Debian Wheezy, just use the following command:
apt-key adv --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 2B24481A && echo "deb http://debian.mytux.fr wheezy main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mytux.list && apt-get update && apt-get install backupchecker backup-manager
Backup Checker is also available for Debian Squeeze, Debian Sid, FreeBSD. Check out the documentation to install it from PyPi or from sources.
Configuring Backup-Manager
Backup-manager will ask what directory you want to store backups, in our case we choose /home/joe/dev/wip
In the configuration file /etc/backup-manager.conf, you need to have the following lines:
export BM_BURNING_METHOD="none"
export BM_UPLOAD_METHOD="none"
export BM_POST_BACKUP_COMMAND="backupchecker -c /etc/backupchecker -l /var/log/backupchecker.log"
Configuring Backup Checker
In order to configure Backup Checker, use the following commands:
# mkdir /etc/backupchecker && touch /var/log/backupchecker.log
Then write the following in /etc/backupchecker/backupmanager.conf:
[main] name=backupmanager type=archive path=/var/archives/laptop-home-joe-dev-wip.%Y%m%d.master.tar.gz files_list=/etc/backupchecker/backupmanager.list
You can see we’re using placeholders for the path value, in order to match each time the latest archive. More information about Backup Checker placeholders in the official documentation.
Last step, the description of your controls on the backup:
[files] wip/data| type|d wip/config/accounts| md5|27c9d75ba5a755288dbbf32f35712338 wip/dump/dump.sql| >100mb
Launch Backup Manager
Just launch the following command:
# backup-manager
After Backup Manager is launched, Backup Checker is automatically launched and verify the new backup of the day where Backup Manager stores the backups.
Possible control failures
Lets say the dump does not have the expected size. It means someone may have messed up with the database! Backup Checker will warn you with the following message in /var/log/backupchecker.log:
$ cat /var/log/backupchecker.log WARNING:root:1 file smaller than expected while checking /var/archives/laptop-home-joe-dev-wip-20150328.tar.gz: WARNING:root:wip/dump/dump.sql size is 18. Should have been bigger than 104857600.
Other possible failures : someone created an account without asking anyone. The hash sum of the file will change. Here is the alert generated by Backup Checker:
$ cat /var/log/backupchecker.log WARNING:root:1 file with unexpected hash while checking /var/archives/laptop-home-joe-dev-wip-20150328.tar.gz: WARNING:root:wip/config/accounts hash is 27c9d75ba5a755288dbbf32f35712338. Should have been 27c9d75ba3a755288dbbf32f35712338.
Another possible failure: someone accidentally (or not) removed the data directory! Backup Checker will detect the missing directory and warn you:
$ cat /var/log/backupchecker.log WARNING:root:1 file missing in /var/archives/laptop-home-joe-dev-wip-20150328.tar.gz: WARNING:root:wip/data
Awesome isn’t it? The power of a backup tool combined with an automated backup checker. No more surprise when you need your backups. Moreover you spare the waste of time and efforts to control the backup by yourself.
What about you? Let us know what you think of it. We would be happy to get your feedbacks. The project cares about our users and the outdated feature was a awesome idea in a feature request by one of the Backup Checker user, thanks Laurent!