Backup and restore for block devices.
Project description
Backy
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 (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 scheduler -c CONFIG
backy check -c CONFIG
backy [-b BACKUPDIR ] init
backy [-b BACKUPDIR ] backup TAGS
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
Creating backups
Create a configuration file (see below). Spawn the scheduler with your favourite init system:
backy scheduler -c /path/to/backy.conf
The scheduler runs in the foreground until it is shot by SIGTERM. On resume, the scheduler re-runs missed backup jobs to some degree.
Log output goes to backy.log in the current directory.
Interactive console
Telnet into localhost port 6023 to get a console.
Configuration
Backy’s job scheduler maintains a set of revisions (snapshots) for each configured job according to a schedule. Each revision is marked with a set of tags. A certain number of revisions is kept for each tag.
Refer to examples/backy.conf for a full configuration example. The configuration file is a YAML document with the following top-level sections:
global section
base-dir specifies the root backup directory. Subdirectories are created for each specified backup job.
worker-limit restricts the maximum number of concurrent backy jobs.
schedules section
Defines one or more schedules which are referenced by backup jobs. For example, the schedules section
schedules: mysched: daily: interval: 1d keep: 9 weekly: interval: 7d keep: 5
defines a schedule mysched: a revision tagged “daily” is created once a day and a revision tagged “weekly” is created once a week. If there are more than keep revisions with a specific tag, old revisions are deleted. Note that a revision may have multiple tags. In this case, it is only deleted if the retention rules for all tags are met.
jobs section
Defines a set of backup jobs (i.e., block devices to be backed up). For each job, a source and a schedule must be specified.
Backup Sources
Backy comes with a number of plug-ins which define block-file like sources:
file extracts data from simple image files living on a regular file system.
ceph pulls data from RBD images using Ceph features like snapshots. Needs environment variables like CEPH_ARGS to provide access IDs.
flyingcircus is an extension to the ceph source which we use internally on the Flying Circus hosting platform. It uses advanced features like Consul integration.
It should be easy to write plug-ins for additional sources.
Low-level commands
Generally speaking, use the scheduler. In case of need, the following low-level commands can be invoked directly.
backy status
Prints a status summary of the current backup job.
backy check
Indicates if all configured backup jobs have recent backups. The output is given in a Nagios-compatible format.
backy init
Creates an empty job directory.
backy backup
Unconditionally create a revision (backup) with the given tags.
License
GPLv3
Changelog
2.0b3 (2015-10-02)
Improve telnet console.
If the envionment variable BACKY_FORGET_ABOUT_BTRFS is set, special btrfs features (reflink copies, defrag) are not used. This is intended to run tests on non-btrfs filesystems.
Provide Nix build script.
Generate requirements.txt automatically from buildout versions.cfg.
2.0b2 (2015-09-15)
Introduce scheduler and rework the main backup command. The backy command is now only responsible for dealing with individual backups.
It does no longer care about scheduling.
A new daemon and a central configuration file is responsible for that now. However, it simply calls out to the existing backy command so we can still manually interact with the system even if we do not use the daemon.
Add consul integration for backing up Flying Circus root disk images with clean snapshots (by asking fc.qemu to use fs-freeze before preparing a Ceph snapshot).
Switch to shorter UUIDs. Existing files with old UUIDs are compatible.
Turn the configuration format into YAML. Old files are still compatible. New configs will be generated as YAML.
Performance: defrag all new files automatically to avoid btrfs degrading extent performance. It appears this doesn’t completely duplicate all CoW data. Will have to monitor this in the future.
2.0b1 (2014-07-07)
Clean up docs.
Add classifiers in setup.py.
More or less complete rewrite expecting a copy-on-write filesystem as the target.
Flexible backup scheduling using free-form tags.
Compatible with Python 3.2-3.4.
Initial open source import as provided by Daniel Kraft (D9T).
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