backups.md

Backups with rsnapshot

There’s no feeling more intense than starting over. If you've deleted your homework the day before it was due, as I have, or if you left your wallet at home and you have to go back, after spending an hour in the commute, if you won some money at the casino and then put all your winnings on red, but it came up black, if you got your best shirt dry-cleaned before a wedding and then immediately dropped food on it, if you won an argument with a friend and then later discovered that they just returned to their original view, starting over is harder than starting up.

From the videogame "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddyd"

• Optional. Accessing NFS drives
• Install and setup rsnapshot

Optional. Accessing NFS drives

Assuming here you have a NAS or similar with NFS and appropiate user/permissions set. In ubuntu server install the nfs tools:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nfs-common

Create the local mountpoint sudo mkdir -p /mnt/backups

Mount the NFS shared folder sudo mount 192.168.1.100:/volume1/backups/ubuntu-server /mnt/backups (your NFS IP and shared volume will differ). Confirm that the drive is mounted df –h

Filesystem                                    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                                          3.8G     0  3.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs                                         786M  1.2M  785M   1% /run
/dev/sda2                                     469G   12G  434G   3% /
tmpfs                                         3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                                         5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs                                         3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
192.168.1.100:/volume1/backups/ubuntu-server  2.7T  1.7T  1.1T  61% /mnt/backups
tmpfs                                         786M     0  786M   0% /run/user/1000

Test your write permissions

cd /mnt/backups
touch test

Check on the NFS server that the file is actually there. Now you can automate this to mount at boot time. Add this entry in /etc/fstab

192.168.1.100:/volume1/backups/ubuntu-server /mnt/backups nfs defaults 0 0

Next time you start your machine the NFS share will be automatically mounted at the specified mount point.

Install and setup rsnapshot

rsnapshot is a backup tool based on rsync. It's fast and can do incremental backups. Install rsnapshot sudo apt install rsnapshot and configure it sudo nano /etc/rsnapshot.conf. The most important thing to remember is use tabs instead of spaces to separate keys and values. Set your intervals and folders to backup. I have created 7 beta which I will use for the daily backups and 4 gamma that I will use for the weekly backups. At the moment I do not need to create any hourly backup. Also specify what to backup. rsnapshot can backup from anything to anything. In my case I hace rsnapshot locally installed and I am pushing the backups to a NFS. But I could also use a remote server with rsnapshot to pull my files via ssh.

After saving the configuration file check for errors rsnapshot configtest. It is advisable also to dry-run test the backup levels/intervals specified in the config file rsnapshot -t beta.

Automate your backups in crontab -e as the root user

@daily /usr/bin/rsnapshot beta &> /dev/null
@weekly /usr/bin/rsnapshot gamma &> /dev/null

Make sure that root will have read/write and admin (change permissions, take ownership) permissions on the NFS drive. Otherwise you will get errors like: /bin/cp: failed to preserve ownership for '/mnt/backups/alpha.1/localhost/var': Operation not permitted