Quickstart

This is the quick start guide for deploying backupmanager on a computer.

Requirements and Installation

Backup Manager requires at least Python 3.4 and pip3. These dependencies are in the repositories for:

• Debian 8 and higher
• Archlinux

For debian run:

$ apt-get install python3-pip
$ pip3 install backupmanager
$ backupctl init

This will install backupmanager and create a example /etc/backup.yml configured for borg

It is also important to install the backup tool itself. In this example Borg. The easiest way to install borg is using the static linked binary:

$ wget https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/releases/download/1.0.0rc1/borg-linux64
$ chmod +x borg-linux64
$ mv borg-linux64 /usr/local/bin/borg

Repeat the borg installation steps for the server that is used as backup destination. Borg requires the binary both on the server and the client.

Configuration

In the example the host that needs backup is zenbook and the backup destination is 192.168.2.101

First make sure you can ssh login from zenbook to 192.168.2.101 with publickey authentication:

$ ssh-keygen
$ ssh-copy-id backupuser@192.168.2.101

The backups will be stored in /mnt/storage/backups/zenbook on the backup destination in this example. The backup destination directory needs to exist so create it first. Then on zenbook run:

$ borg init ssh://backupuser@192.168.2.101/mnt/storage/backups/zenbook

If you run the borg init command locally on the backup destination server then the borg client on zenbook won’t have a trust relation with the remote borg repository and the backup will fail until you run one backup manually.

Now you need to enter the backup destination details in /etc/backup.yml. Open the file and modify the values under where: to the correct values for your backup server.

where:
    type: ssh
    host: 192.168.2.101
    user: backupuser
    path: /mnt/storage/backups/zenbook
    archive-template: 'Backup-%Y-%m-%d'

    # Compression options, use ~, fast or slow.
    # ~    : uncompressed backups
    # fast : lz4 compressed backups
    # slow : lzma,8 compressed backups
    compression: fast

The archive-template will be used to generate the backup name for each backup. The default is good for most cases. It is possible to use a single repository for multiple clients and then you need to use different archive-template values so two clients don’t create the same archive. It is not advised to use a single repository for multiple clients in most cases because you can’t backup with two clients to the same repository at the same time. The first client will hold an exclusive lock on the whole repository while backupping and the second client will fail.

The compression setting manages, you guessed it, the compression type. It is possible to run borg without compression to save a little bit of cpu time but that will easily double the bandwidth and storage required for the backup. The fast compression is enough if you have a fast link between the client and the server and no disk storage problems. You can use slow compression if you backup over a very slow internet link but it will use a lot more memory and cpu while backupping.

Enabling the backup

The last thing that is needed is starting the backup somehow. You can manually start the backup with:

$ backupctl run

You can also put that command in cron for a quick and dirty backup setup. If the linux distribution on your client (zenbook in the example) has systemd as init system then backupctl can create a systemd service and timer for you:

$ backupctl setup-systemd

This will create a daily backuptask managed with systemd. Now you can wait or start the backup with:

$ systemctl start backup

Viewing backup status

If one or more backups have run then you can view the backup status with:

$ backupctl info

It will display a list of backups and some global statistics about the backups.