(MT)(GS)(BK): our definitive (MT) Grid-Service backup solution
We use (MT)(GS) and we find it great for a certain range of our needs. But I love backups, so I've searched for a good backup solution for (GS); probably the only serious one is http://gsbackup.org, which I find so damn cool, but does not answer to my needs.
Backup for my devs @welaika and for our clients must have:
external location
cron friendly...
...and so non-interactive
a bit secure
use as little as possible of the production server's resources
...well...restorable. I mean RESTORABLE!
Ok now sorry if I'm going OT, but I mean RESTORABLE! A compressed tarball with a fucking myriad of files for an amount of 10GB, is not restorable! Ok? Come back to us now.
Remember that I'm a sysadmin, not a dev. So what have I done to do a backup as I like? Well I've just managed to compile rdiff-backup on (MT)'s Grid-Service. Voilà!
All our centralized backup system is based on rdiff-backup, so after I installed it on GS, I've added them to our backup system and it works like a charm. Woha!
Some complexities
Due to the jungle of symlinks and to the fact that rdiff-backup doesn't follow them I have tricked a bit to get the right configuration.
Firstly the path
I've got the right path doing
$ ssh user@gs-server pwd
that is the one that will work, because is the one absolute path that rdiff-backup will find connecting to the server via SSH.
The include path
If you want to use a globbing file list or --exclude --include options, remember that you'll have to use the full path to write them
/nfs/cxx/hxx/mnt/122087/domains /nfs/cxx/hxx/mnt/122087/mydir
How?
I've written a stupid script that works. You can clone or just read it from here: https://gist.github.com/pioneerskies/5085751 Basic instruction there...but is just the case of a
bash (BK).sh
Conclusions
Have fun guys. Tell me if in trouble. And if you are interested in the script that we use to manage all the backups wrapping rdiff-backup, let me know; at the moment it works, but the code is awful and expecting a deep refactor, so I'm not going to shout it at the world just now. ;)
