FatBack

FatBack is a simple backup system that utilizes basic system tools including heavy reliance on rsync.

• Backup to disk over the network
• Creates gzipped tarballs of:
  • Most recent images of backup target
  • Incremental copies of changes from current
• Leverages rsync heavily for:
  • Incremental transfer of data
  • SSH transport to encrypt data in transit
  • Incremental backups of changes
  • Exclusion of files/directories from backup
• Uses Wake On LAN to wake machines that may be sleeping
• Configurable retention period for old data (old deltas from current)

The data backed up consists of:

• Full backups named:

    host_-path-to-dir_FULL.tar.gz
  

• Incremental backups (retained for specified number of days) named:

    host_-path-to-dir_INC_YYYYMMDD.tar.gz
  

The backups are stored in a configurable location:

    ${BACKUP_DIR}/jobname/host/

All backups are stored as simple gzipped tarballs making restoring files simple. There is no automatic restore capability provided nor required. I just kept it simple here.

Usage

• master.conf sets defaults for all jobs and must be present. I tried to heavily comment this file to explain all of the possible options.

• Create a backup job by:

  • create jobname.conf to over ride any default settings form master.conf
  • create jobname.sked for each host/dir you want to backup (see below for format)
  • If you want to exclude files from a backup, create a jobname.hostname.exclude file

• run the job by calling:

    fatback jobname
  

NOTE: You must have ssh access with key based authentication setup between backup server and backup target.

File Formats

.conf

• Key/Value pairs declaring shell variables.

.sked

Each line is a colon seperated list.

host:directory to backup:number of days to keep incremental backups:exclude file:MAC address

.exclude

Though my naming convention is jobname.hostname.exclude, you can name the files whatever you want since you can specify the file in the .sked file. This is simply a rsync exclude file and uses the syntax for rsync

BUGS

There are probably a number (and probably some feature I never implemented).

The biggest "issue" is the need to decompress the most recent full backup for each backup run. This is a bit ineffeceint, but hasn't really been a problem in practice.