My Projects: Backula backup system

This is third post in the "My Projects" series. This time, like my previous post, it is also dedicated to the World Backup Day. Two posts in a day - why not?

Although the project was about the same, there were few significant differences. 1st – 5 years difference (2009), and 2nd – mainly Linux environment.


It was a middle-size company. In a central office they had all things IT departments must have, including backup system (TSM). But I was hired in a remote division in another country, where was no System Administrator before me. There were many things to do, but today we are talking about backups.

What we had:

Three Linux servers, one external storage, limited budget.

Well, in situation with a single storage I have no possibility to protect data from a failure of that particular storage. But I split the discs in storage in two different arrays, and dedicate one of them for backups only.

This time I wanted something Enterprise-level, reliable and scalable. At that time Bacula fitted all my needs. The only problem was to get used to it. When I have opened User's manual and found out that there are 764 pages.... I was encouraged! Why? My previous job was quite boring so I was "hungry" for challenges like that. In a few days I was ready to propose a solution and install it in production.

Solution:

Quite simple, as reliable things should be

• Bacula as a backup system
• Standard schedule:
• Daily incremental backups
• Weekly differential backups
• Monthly full backups
• Workstation were also added if user desire

 Result:

Backup system is not intended to have configuration changes often. Configured once, it requires just to watch on daily notifications and make some periodical data restore.
After a new server added it was enough to create a single file with a list of directories to exclude from backup (/tmp, /media, /sys, etc. exluded by default).

Have a nice World Backup Day!

My Projects: History: backup scripts

This is second post in the "My Projects" series, and this time it dedicated to the World Backup Day.

Again, I will describe a project which I have quite some time ago, so some details could be missed.

It was 2004 and one of the first things I have decided to improve when come to new company was backups. Well, "improve" is not a correct word here, since there was nothing to improve – I had to create it from zero. It was quite surprising that 6-years old company doesn't have any backup system.

What we had:

No backup system. No money for that.

My experience at that time didn't allow me to propose any free backup solution, in the same time I was fascinated by writing different CMD scripts – I already did most of administrative tasks in windows using command line. So, instead of trying something that is ready, I decide to write my own bunch of scripts for backups.

Solution:

After a few days of work I've got something like following:

• Nightly script scanned all folders listed in a text file.
• All files with "Archive" attribute set were archived to a compressed file named like I_YYYYMMDD-HHSS.rar. After that the "Archive" attribute was cleared. This allowed me to have Incremental backups.
• Once a month a Full backup was made.
• Full backup older that 3 month was removed with all Incremental backups related.
• Intelligent restore script allowed me to restore any file or folder from any day from last two month.
• I was able to run the backup script at any moment, not just at night, and that allowed me to make several different backup copies during the day if needed.

To be honest – there is nothing special in this project. I can create something like that in few hours now. But it was quite interesting experience for a young admin that allows me to understand better how CMD scripts works.

Result:

Scripts-based backup system completely fulfilled our needs at that time. The restoring procedure was used many time during several years without a single failure.