[NCLUG] Some new backup-related software releases.

[Sean Reifschneider]

I know over the years I've mentioned to many of youe the backup system that
we're running at the tummy facility in Denver, and using rsync over SSH in
any case.

I've released a couple of software packages that are related to that topic:

   https://github.com/tummy-dot-com/tummy-backup
   https://github.com/realgo/backup-client

The first is the full backup system that we are using, and the second is a
wrapper around rsync meant specifically for use in the ssh authorized_keys
file.

backup-client allows you to use non-root accounts to SSH in as for your
backup, it also detects if the remote end has requested compression or a
bwlimit (which you usually have to manually change on the client side when
using authorized_keys), and it also can run helper scripts to run tasks
before and after the backup (dumping databases, snapshotting a windows
virtual machine and mounting up the snapshots so rsync can walk them).

tummy-backup is the management and monitoring system for doing rsync
backups.  It includes a web interface for setting up hosts to back up,
reviewing usage information, restoring data, etc...  It uses ZFS (tested
with either zfs-fuse or ZFS on Linux) for storing the backup data, and
managing the deltas between different backup intervals.

It's proven to be a fire-and-forget solution, sending an e-mail if things
need attending to.  I'm even using it on backup servers with as few as 5
hosts, because I just don't have to worry about it silently failing of the
like.  We also have it running at the tummy facility on 3 backup servers
clustered (central management of the cluster) handling hundreds of
machines.

It should be fairly easy to convert this over to using something like the
"hard link trick" or btrfs instead of ZFS, but really ZFS works so well
that I haven't gone down that path.

Sean