backup/restore remotely

[inittux]

I'm looking for some different ways to backup/restore files from a remote server that I incase I mess up something really bad.

I'll be able to restore instead of having to do a full reinstall. I'll check google later.

[hybrid]

I use a few tools for server backup and restore:

• rsync
  
  
• tar
  
  
• partimage
  
  

rsync

 

rsync is a tool which synchronises files and folders from one place to another. You can use it locally, or across remote machines. It is particularly good because it only transfers the files that have changed -- and even only transfers the individual portions of files that have changed -- so saves a lot of unnecessary transfer when used remotely, or on a slow USB drive.

 

I use rsync to keep backups of whole trees of folders and files, for example, /var/www to /backup/var/www. If I have a problem and want to revert the whole folder back to the backup, I can simply reverse the direction in which rsync runs, and it synchronises the backup copy to the live copy, 'undo'-ing all of the changes on the live copy.

 

We use rsync for this site, keeping seven copies of the web server data folder, one for each day of the week. rsync runs each day, and synchronises just the changes that have happened in the past week to the backup folder for that day of the week. This way, we have seven full backups of the files and can restore from any of them, but the CPU and disk I/O impact of the backup is pretty low, since we're only backing up relatively small changes each night!

 

tar

 

tar is great for taking a snapshot of some files and folders and storing them in one file. It's easy to keep track of the files, it's simple and ubiquitous and you can easily apply compression to the archived files to reduce disk space requirements. It's also more difficult to accidentally instruct it to do something destructive when creating a backup (such as synchronise in the wrong direction with rsync!) The primary disadvantage is that you will be creating a brand new tar archive each time you want to do a backup, which uses more transfer and CPU time.

 

I use tar backups as well, so that I have different types of backups from which I can restore, in case any one of them goes wrong!

 

partimage

 

This probably won't apply in your case for this particular scenario, since you seem to be interested in backing up files/folders, but for completeness, I'll mention it. partimage dumps an entire partition on disk into a file, optionally with compression. This means that the entire operating system can be backed up and restored exactly as it is. I use this from time to time so that I can restore the whole OS very rapidly and not do a reinstall (after doing that, I might then updated the web server documents with the most recent tar backup, for example, so that it is then up-to-date).

 

The main disadvantage is that you have to backup the whole partition each time, and you can't run partimage to backup or restore a mounted partition -- so I must reboot from a live CD, for example, to create or restore the backup.

 

--

 

I'm sure there are also many other great tools that I haven't thought of (or innovative ways to use the ones I have mentioned). Exactly which tool you will pick depends on what your requirements and priorities for this particular backup scenario are. :)

[Dungeon-Dave]

Are you looking to remotely fire off a backup (eg: webmin) or looking to backup from one server onto another?

 

As Hybrid mentioned above, I'll add things like sbackup, rbackup, simple-backup etc - there are many tools that allow a backup over sftp/rsync.

 

Do you know how much data you seek to backup?

[inittux]

Are you looking to remotely fire off a backup (eg: webmin) or looking to backup from one server onto another?

 

As Hybrid mentioned above, I'll add things like sbackup, rbackup, simple-backup etc - there are many tools that allow a backup over sftp/rsync.

 

Do you know how much data you seek to backup?

 

It's more for my webserver project, as in if I screw something up I can restore it. I was more thinking as in /etc files and my web data which would be in /home/user/html/website/htdocs. Right now it's not much. It's more of knowing how to do it for when I make mistakes so I don't have to reconfigure everything. And if I make a mistake on my website that's not easily undo-able so I can restore it and of course also making backups/restoring my mysql db's

[hybrid]

At a very simple level, you can begin by just doing manual tar backups of those directories:

 

Code:

# cd /
# tar --same-owner -czpvf /backup/etc.tar.gz /etc

 

I personally use the --same-owner and -p switches so that my tar archives preserve the exact permissions. The other switches:

 

-c -- create a new archive

-z -- use gzip compression

-p -- preserve permissions, as I mentioned

-v -- verbose progress, so I can see all the files as they are added to the archive

-f -- the archive created should have the file path and file name that immediately follows the -f

 

Then we have the target filename for the new backup file, followed by the source directory to backup.

 

(We change directory to one level above the source directory to make the internal structure of the archive a little cleaner.)

 

It is very similar for other directories:

 

Code:

# cd /home/user/html/website
# tar --same-owner -czpvf /backup/htdocs.tar.gz htdocs

 

MySQL backups can be done with the excellent mysqldump. A basic example:

 

Code:

# mysqldump -u root -p -A > /backup/mysql_dbs.sql

 

Obviously, all these examples will need to have filenames altered each time you run them, to avoid overwriting your old backups, and they have to be run manually! If you're doing this a lot, it's useful to put this sort of thing together into a script that runs automatically, so you don't even have to think about it!

 

If you wanted to restore one of the tar backups, you would do the following. Note that we'll restore into somewhere temporary -- you can then check everything looks good after extracting the files before moving them over to the 'live' location:

 

Code:

#  cd /tmp
# mkdir restore
# cd restore
# tar --same-owner -xzpvf /backup/htdocs.tar.gz

 

In this example, the archive will be restored to /tmp/restore/htdocs. Note that the only real difference is we don't provide the destination directory (tar assumes we want to extract to the current working directory), and we have the -x switch for extract.

[inittux]

I'll have a look at that, and how do I for example back up from my server to my own pc?

[hybrid]

If you're running an SSH daemon on your server, you could use scp to 'pull' the files down from the server and onto your local system.

 

Code:

$ scp -P your_ssh_port your_username@your_server:/backup/htdocs.tar.gz htdocs.tar.gz

 

That would bring down the specified file on the remote machine and store it in the current directory on your local system.

[Dungeon-Dave]

<blockquote data-ipsquote="" class="ipsQuote" data-ipsquote-contentcommentid="15227" data-ipsquote-username="Dungeon-Dave" data-cite="Dungeon-Dave" data-ipsquote-timestamp="1318524617" data-ipsquote-contentapp="forums" data-ipsquote-contenttype="forums" data-ipsquote-contentid="4169" data-ipsquote-contentclass="forums_Topic"><div> Are you looking to remotely fire off a backup (eg: webmin) or looking to backup from one server onto another? As Hybrid mentioned above, I'll add things like sbackup, rbackup, simple-backup etc - there are many tools that allow a backup over sftp/rsync. Do you know how much data you seek to backup?

It's more for my webserver project, as in if I screw something up I can restore it. I was more thinking as in /etc files and my web data which would be in /home/user/html/website/htdocs. Right now it's not much. It's more of knowing how to do it for when I make mistakes so I don't have to reconfigure everything. And if I make a mistake on my website that's not easily undo-able so I can restore it and of course also making backups/restoring my mysql db's</div></blockquote>
 

If you've documented what you've done to build your server/site up until now, you've got a "recovery plan" - so you know how to bring a base install back up to your working webserver.

 

Basically, it's a case of including those differences (config files in /etc, content in htdocs, as you said) into a backup plan and having some plan or script to do the rebuild. I've done this a few times on some boxes to migrate servers and rebuild a new platform after an OS upgrade.

[inittux]

Sorry Dave. More like backing up from one server to another. As in from my remote server to my pc(other server). Yeah that's true lol as long as I have it documented I have a basic backup plan. Will have a look at the ones the both of you mentioned and let you know once I've tried some of them out :)

[Dungeon-Dave]

As well as using SCP, there's also LFTP or WGET to leech over files.

 

If you have SSH key authentication, those commands will seemlessly login - no pass required. This is how pull backups across servers.