The Problem

As system administrators we are faced with a variety of problems on our servers from day to day. Over long periods of time we experience different issues with our user community and our equipment. This leads us to recognize a variety of different needs and, in general, try to meet them with little scripts. We run these little scripts every night in the hope that we might be better prepared for the days ahead. After a while, though, the scripts start to get complicated. Then, when disaster does strike again - and it will - we find out the hard way that things didn't quite work out as planned. There are always minor details that conspire against us (often just simple system software upgrades and changes in the behavior of the user community.) The problems also tend to happen most when we are most confident that we are doing what we need to be doing - which leads to much embarrassment. This forces us to review the backup procedure and make more adjustments.

The Solution

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• easily perform simple tasks, such as tarballing specific folders or collections of folders, quickly and conveniently,
• intelligently execute common tasks such as backing-up a well-known service.
• allow us to simply, quickly and easily add to and adjust the overall procedure in response to day-to-day issues.

SysBackup is a swiss-army-knife-type utility that helps simplify and organize the nightly backup tasks. It allows the system administrator to quickly and easily script jobs that tarball folders and compress files into a backup set. The jobs are really easy to setup.

The jobs make use of a collection of plugins that are designed to simplify common tasks. Each plugin is a small and simple script that is designed to perform some kind of common task. For example the mysql.plugin script is designed to backup a MySQL database server, the mailman.plugin script is designed to backup a mailman installation, etc.

Some of the plugins perform generic functions. The sysdirs.plugin, for example, is designed to tarball any list of system folders. This tends to work well for system folders that are rarely updated but wastes a huge amount of disk space if you try using it on user home directories. Users typically make changes to the files in their working folders and those changes, when part of a huge tarball, prevent the SysBackup utility from making use of hardlinks to save disk space. Therefore, the homedirs.plugin is designed to list all the files and folders in a users' home directory and compress everything into separate files. This more granular approach can save a great deal of disk space. It can also make it easier for the system administrator to find files that might be requested by the users.

At the time of this writing there is a small collection of plugins available and, hopefully, that collection will grow over time.

Once you get to know about the different plugins you can setup the jobs you need to properly backup your server or workstation. Again, setting-up the backup jobs is fairly easy. Job configuration scripts are really just little scripts that schedule calls to the plugins. If you need to do something complicated you can take a look at the code for the existing plugins and roll your own.

The resulting backup sets are conveniently organized into daily, weekly and monthly rotations that are automatically pruned for you. Each backupset contains a set of sub-folders containing, hopefully, everything related to a particular service or user.

Together these tools become a powerful and effective solution to the day-to-day problems faced by a system administrator. At the same time, SysBackup is simple and flexible enough that new jobs, possibly involving new plugins, can easily be added as new issues are identified.

Limitations

• SysBackup was written for Linux. It will run fine under Cygwin or XAMPP and the sys-tarballs class can be configured to use zip instead of tar or pax. Then again there are many Windows backup solutions available and they tend to understand the Windows Registry and NTFS file attributes - issues that SysBackup makes no effort to address.
  
  
• SysBackup is not a plug-and-play backup utility. You can't just install and run it - it won't do anything for you unless you take the time to think about what you need and configure the jobs and plugins to do what you need them to do.
  
  
• SysBackup is not a bit-copy utility. In theory you could setup a job that tarballs an entire server or workstation - but that's not what SysBackup is designed to do. There are other solutions available for bit-copy operations. For example:
  • On Amazon AWS you can make bit-copies of your VM's using the Create Image function available through the web-based GUI.
  • On physical VM hosts you can simply take a snapshot of the VM's storage and compress it to create a bit-image of an entire server.
  • On physical workstations and servers you can boot a SysRescCD.org CD and use Partition Image to bit-copy an entire host over to network storage.

Be Prepared!

It's always a good idea to make some kind of backup - having copies of data is better than not having copies - but any experienced system administrator will tell you that backups are not, by themselves, very useful. Blindly running a backup utility is not the same as being prepared for the day-to-day issues that your organization will face over a period of years.

The goal of any serious backup process is to be prepared. An experienced system administrator wants to make sure that any piece of equipment (server or workstation) is setup so that users will be able to get what they need, when they need it, for different types of restore operations. This often means being able to go back in time and:

• find copies of files that users have accidentally changed or deleted (sometimes undetected for days, weeks or months,)
• help users recover from long-term data value degradation caused by malware and software bugs,
• restore a service or services that have been damaged by software upgrades,
• migrate a server to a new host,
• comply with regulations concerning long-term storage of data
• and respond to regulatory agency requests for otherwise expired information.

SysBackup is a simple, flexible and efficient tool that you can use to help you get the results you need - but only if you plan the process, test it and adjust it to ensure that you are, in fact, getting what you need!