Author - Copyright (C) 2012-2020 Mark Grant
1 ... Project Description
2 ... AutoTools (configure and make) Installation
3 ... Installation of Distro-Native Packages
4 ... Utility Scripts
This AutoTools project contains a backup system.
The system can perform 1, 2 or 3 of 4 backup strategies; a full add hoc backup, a weekly differential or a weekly incremental and a daily selective. NB Weekly differential and weekly incremental backups are an either / or situation.
The full ad hoc backup can be used at any time for an independent backup.
Filenames are:- backupYYYYMMDDHHMM.tar.gz
The weekly differential backup facilitates a full weekly backup and subsequent daily differential backups, (the differential backups being changes from the weekly backup - not any previous daily differential backup).
e.g. Weekly backup performed week 2 of the month on Thursday Daily differential backup performed on the following Saturday Daily differential backup performed on the following Monday
In this case the Monday backup holds changes since the Thursday weekly backup. The above example also shows that you do not have to run the weeklies weekly nor the dailies daily.
Filenames are:- Weekly backupW.tar.gz (where W is the week of the month (1 - 5) Daily backupDDD.tar.gz (eg DDD is Tue)
The weekly incremental backup facilitates a full weekly backup as in the differential version but with subsequent daily incremental backups, (the incremental backups being changes from the preceding backup be it weekly or daily incremental).
e.g. Weekly backup performed week 2 of the month on Thursday Daily incremental backup performed on the following Saturday Daily incremental backup performed on the following Monday
In this case the Monday backup holds changes since the Saturday daily incremental backup. Unlike the daily differential case it is important that daily incremental backups are not overwritten without an intervening weekly backup. eg Looking at the above example, if no further backups are taken until the next Saturday and a daily incremental is run, this will overwrite the first Saturday and would destroy the chain from the Thursday weekly backup, there would be a gap in the archive.
Filenames are:- Weekly backupW.tar.gz (where W is the week of the month (1 - 5) Daily backupDDD.tar.gz (eg DDD is Tue)
The daily selective backups archive a user-specified ,(in a config file), set of files or directories which are overwritten on a weekly basis.
The system allows for the target device to be either a cifs or NFS share and this is defined using the setup.sh script. The system supplies scripts for mounting and unmounting these shares.
Although the commands can all be run manually, it would be more normal to run them via cron.
e.g. root's crontab might look like:-
10 17 * * 0,1,2,3,4,5,6 netbckup -s
15 00 * * 5 netbckup -w
15 00 * * 0,1,2,3,4,6 netbckup -d
In this example the selective backup could be the home directories for all users.
CIFS and NFS shares are supported. Typically CIFS would be used for Network Attached Storage (NAS) and NFS would be used to a server.
Three scripts are supplied to manage the shares:- attbckshare - mount the backups share chkbckshare - check if the backup share is mounted detbckshare - unmount the backup share
So many restore possibilities exist that no restore script is supplied, the user must follow the general process of:-
attbckshare Restore files using tar detbckshare
backups.conf - The main configuration file populated by setup.sh
bcksystem.exclude - A file supplied in this project package containing files and directories to be excluded by all backups. It typically contains directories such as /proc and /sys. This file must NOT be edited, it will be overwritten by subsequent package updates. Use the other .exclude files supplied.
bckweekly.exclude - Files and directories, (in addition to those specified in bcksystem.exclude), to be excluded from full weekly backups.
bckdaily.exclude - As for bckweekly.exclude but for daily differential / incremental backups.
bckseldaily.files - File and directories to be included in the daily selective backups.
bckseldaily.exclude - As for bckweekly.exclude but for the daily selective backups.
A log called lixbackups.log in /var/log contains a log of backup runs. A file is placed in the logrotate.d directory to manage these log files.
At a source modification / development level, this project expects to reside in a git environment. This manifests itself in 2 places:-
- ... .gitignore files are included in the source.
- ... The make target, 'srctarball', relies on the command 'git archive' so it will fail if git is not installed or it is not in a git repository.
a) ... Download either the source or distribution tarball (the .tar.gz file) from:-
https://github.com/m-grant-prg/lixbackups/releases
b) ... Extract the tarball preserving the directory structure.
c) ... cd to the directory created.
d) ... If you downloaded the source tarball type 'autoreconf -if'
e) ... Type './configure'
f) ... As root or sudo, type 'make install clean'
g) ... Shares must be set up as needed.
h) ... After only the initial installation run setup.sh from the pkglibexec directory. To find the script location on your system type 'find / -path */lixbackups/setup.sh 2>/dev/null'. Typically in an AutoTools build pkglibexec is /usr/local/libexec/PACKAGE so as root or sudo you would type '/usr/local/libexec/lixbackups/setup.sh'. Answer the prompts from the setup script. Subsequent to the initial installation, config files can only be modified with an editor, setup.sh will not work.
i) ... Edit the .files and .exclude files as required.
(Quote marks are for textual clarity only).
To uninstall the package:
1 ... cd to the directory created in the above install process.
2 ... As root or sudo, type 'make uninstall clean'
Installation packages native to different distributions are available, please refer to the relevant installation section on the wiki at:-
https://github.com/m-grant-prg/lixbackups/wiki
In the project root directory there is 1 helper script; bootstrap.sh.
This misleadingly named script bootstraps the project build and provides other useful features. The main options below are probably b, c, C, D and T.
In AutoTools it is usually advisable to perform parallel builds. This means you build somewhere other than the project root. This is because building creates files and they would confuse the project root downwards. I always create a build directory straight off the project root, cd to there and do all build and git work from there, (.gitignore is already set to ignore such a directory).
Assuming you adopt the preceding paragraph then a typical invocation of the script would be:-
../bootstrap.sh --config --build ..
The last '..' points the way to project root.
For the full list of arguments to bootstrap.sh, please refer to the options section of the acmbuild wiki, the options are identical:-