backy 2.0a1dev

This is work in progress. Parts of this file are currently fiction.

Backy is a block-based backup utility for virtual machines (i.e. volume files).

Backy is intended to be:

• space-, time-, and network-efficient

• trivial to restore

• reliable

To achieve this, we rely on:

• using a copy-on-write filesystem (like ZFS or btrfs) as the target filesystem to achieve space-efficiency

• using a snapshot-capable main storage for our volumes (e.g. Ceph, LVM, …) that allows easy extraction of changes between snapshots

• leverage proven, existing low-level tools

• keep the code-base small, simple, and well-tested

## Synopsis

backy –help backy [-b <backupdir>] init backy [-b <backupdir>] backup backy [-b <backupdir>] status

## Disaster recovery / full restore

The most important question is: I screwed up - how do I get my data back?

Here’s the fast answer to make a full restore of the most recent backup:

$ cd /srv/backy/my-virtual-machine $ dd if=latest of=/srv/kvm/my-virtual-machine bs=4048000

If you like to pick a specific version, it’s only a little more effort:

$ cd /srv/backy/my-virtual-machine $ backy status == Revisions 2014-04-25 10:07:51 96d8b001-0ffc-4149-8c35-cf003f5638d6 20.00 GiB 252s 2014-04-25 10:13:20 d95e4f6c-cfef-48ee-aec2-d7c9e91c1bec 24.34 MiB 13s

== Summary 2 revisions 20.02 GiB data (estimated) $ dd if=96d8b001-0ffc-4149-8c35-cf003f5638d6 of=/srv/kvm/my-virtual-machine bs=4048000

## Restoring individual files

The image files are exact copies of the data from the virtual disks. You can use regular Linux tools to interact with them:

$ cd /srv/backy/my-virtual-machine $ ls -lah latest lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 Apr 25 10:13 last -> d95e4f6c-cfef-48ee-aec2-d7c9e91c1bec $ kpartx -av d95e4f6c-cfef-48ee-aec2-d7c9e91c1bec add map loop0p1 (253:9): 0 41934815 linear /dev/loop0 8192 $ mkdir /root/restore $ mount -o ro /dev/mapper/loop0p1 /root/restore $ cd /root/restore $ ls bin boot dev etc home lib lost+found media mnt opt proc root run sbin srv sys tmp usr var

To clean up:

$ cd /srv/backy/my-virtual-machine $ umount /root/restore $ kpartx -av d95e4f6c-cfef-48ee-aec2-d7c9e91c1bec

### Backup sub-command

Do a backup.

This includes checking whether a backup is needed, cleaning up from previous incomplete backups, and removing backups that are no longer needed according to the schedule.

If no backup is needed, just exit silently.

### Scrub sub-command

Check consistency of specified revisions.

### Status sub-command

Show backup inventory and provide summary information about backup health.

## Revision specifications

If a command expects a single revision, you can specify full UUIDs, or numbers. Numbers specify the N-th newest revision (0 being the the newest, 1 the previous revision, and so on).

If multiple revisions may be given you can pass a single revision (as described above) or the world ‘all’ to match all existing revisions.

## Examples

XXX

## Exit status

0: Command worked properly. 1: An error occured.

## Authors

• Daniel Kraft <daniel.kraft@d9t.de>

• Christian Theune <ct@gocept.com>

## License

GPLv3

## Hacking

Backy is intended to be compatible with Python 3.2 and 3.3. It is expected to work properly on Linux and Mac OS X, even though specific backends may not be avaible on some platforms.

$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/ctheune/backy $ cd backy $ virtualenv –python=python3.3 . $ bin/python bootstrap.py $ bin/buildout $ bin/py.test