serapeum.backup 1.0.6

Role

The setting remote_role determines whether serapeum.backup will attempt to backup servers to the local system (source) or backup the local system to some remote server (backup). By default, it’s set to source.

• Setting it to backup will create a backup of the local system and use the remote (hence the term remote_role) as its backup location.

• Setting it to source will create a backup of the remote system and store the backup locally.

The key backup_path contains the path the backups will be written to, either a local path (source) or a remote (backup) one.

Note that when remote_role is backup and thus backup_path is a remote path, you do not have to include user and host (e.g. user@host::path), as this will be generated automatically from the remote configuration.

File selection

sources_file and excludes_file refer to the selection of files (or directories) you want to backup. Both files must be json-files which have a key called list. The list key contains a list of fully qualified directories to backup.

• sources_file contains a list of directories or files you want to have backed up.

• excludes_file has a list of files or directories inside your source directories you want to exclude from backing up. If, for example, you have /home/pieter in your sources_file, but want to exclude LargeDir from the backup, you specify /home/pieter/LargeDir inside your excludes_file.

Your entire path will be replicated inside your backup location. If you specified /home/pieter inside sources_file your remote location will contain /home/pieter (and not just pieter, which some applications might do).

Remote configuration

The application interacts with your remote backup server using rdiff-backup and ssh keys. You must have rdiff-backup installed on the remote server as well as locally, inside /usr/bin. You must also have a user that is allowed to connect via ssh, with a key, and has the necessary rights to run /usr/bin/rdiff-backup as sudo without a password.

• remote_user, remote_ssh and remote_loc configure the remote. remote_loc contains the address (IP or FQDN) of your remote system. user and ssh refer to the user you want to log in as and the location of the private ssh key on this system.

MySQL configuration

Backing up a MySQL installation can be enabled or disabled through the backup_mysql setting.

The application uses the mysqldump utility to perform backups of your MySQL (or equivalent) server. All databases will be dumped and the dump will be stored locally and then transferred to the remote location using rdiff-backup. The local copy will be deleted (for security reasons).

• local_path is the directory the dump will be stored in. This directory must exist. Not that this can be a path on a remote system if remote_role is set to source.

• host, username and password must refer to a user that has the necessary rights to execute a dump of the entire MySQL installation. This requires SELECT, LOCK TABLES, SHOW VIEW and RELOAD privileges on all databases.

• remote_user, remote_ssh, remote_loc/remote_list and backup_path are used to configure rdiff-backup for the backup of the MySQL dump. They can be the same settings as for the back-up of your files (see Remote configuration), but this is not a requirement.

Email configuration

When a backup job fails, the application sends of an email with the output of rdiff-backup or mysqldump.

• mail_dest has the email address of the recipient (e.g. you).

• smtp_server, smtp_port, smtp_username and smtp_password configure the connection to a SMTP server.