Re: Seeking Wisdom Concerning Backups

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 05:49:47PM -0600, Kent West wrote:
I have a small server on which I need to backup the /home partition.

I have a Barracuda Terastation Pro backup server sitting right next to
it, connected via Ethernet.

The problem is that the Terastation Pro only offers three connection
methods: Windows Fileshare (Samba/smb/cifs), Apple Filesharing (AFS),
and FTP).

I'd go with FTP


I came into the Linux world about the time that FTP was being deprecated
in favor of SFTP and its variants, so I have a real skittishness of
using plain FTP.

If you need security between the two boxes (or on the backup box), then
pipe the tarball through OpenSSL's enc before sending it via FTP.

I want something:

* simple
* that will back up 10 - 40 GB of /home partition
tarball, compressed, then encrypted with enc
* preferably making a full backup every week or so with incrementals
every day, tossing out old fulls/incrementals as new ones are made
Write a simple script
* that will work over SMB or FTP securely enough that I can stomach it
* that preserves directory structure/permissions
openssl encryption
* that doesn't run into arbitrary limits like 2GB (or works around them)
ftp
* is automatic, so once set up, I don't have to think about it
script, put it in /etc/cron.daily
* does not require X or web server installation/tweaking to configure
Just tweak your script.
* does not require any sort of server piece (other than perhaps an
/etc/init.d "service" installed as part of a quick and easy "aptitude
install ..."
* does not require fancy back-end stuff, like MySQL

I know some of you experts see a solution immediately in using tar or
rsync, and are thinking, "Well, if Kent had just done his research he'd
know that if he'd XXX, then YYY...", but that's just it; I'm not a
full-time researcher of how tar and rsync and Bacula works, and thus I'm
throwing myself on the mercy of the community for a workable solution.

(I suspect there may be a lot of people like me who knows we need to be
doing backups but can't find a 2nd-grade-easy system to accomplish the
task.)

I don't know what a Barracuda Terastation Pro backup server is, but if
it has an ftp server that will allow you to upload a compressed
encrypted tarball, then here's what I'd suggest:

Think of a tool chain. In this case, work backwards since you are
limited to ftp.

First decide if you want to have a local tarball on the box and then
transfer the tarball, or if you want to create and transfer the tarball
in one step. Either way, I would use a tarball. You say you wish to
backup /home so that's easy (assuming no --excludes). Note that if you
don't want a copy of the tarball locally, you'll need an ftp client that
can take stdin as input. If that doesn't work, see if it can take a
named pipe (fifo); you would make a fifo in, e.g. /var/local/backup and
pipe things to that then pipe from that to the ftp client.

Then compress the tarball. Just use gzip. bzip2 makes slightly smaller
archives but uses a lot more CPU time and isn't available on default
installs.

Then if you want to encrypt the tarball, run it through OpenSSL's
encryption, e.g.:

openssl bf -a -e -salt -in {file} -out {file.bf}

If this is going into a pipe-line, then -in and -out would not be needed
as they default to stdin and stdout. You'd also want to provide it with
a password source if you want it automated.

This file.tar.gz.bf (or file.tgz.bf) tarball would then get sent via ftp
to the backup server.

To make this automated, you'll need to write a simple script.

We can work on the details but let me know if my assumptions are valid
(e.g. standard ftp will work).

Doug.


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