Module Backup-Block-Copy

Overview

This module provides support for creating a low-level copy of a block device to a compressed flat file. This can be very useful when a block device is used as a virtual disk for a virtual machine. You must be sure the block device won’t receive any modification during the time of the backup for it to be consistent. It means the block device must either not be used (not mounted), or you must work on a snapshot of such a device. rubackup can perform a snapshot of LVM logical volumes just before the backup in order to make consistent backup of block devices while they are in use.

Configuration

The most important argument is block_device and it must point to the block device for which you want to create a backup such as /dev/sda1 or /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 if you are using LVM. If you want to make backup of LVM Logical-Volumes then you can also get rubackup to create a snapshot of it using the two optional arguments: snapshot_type and snapshot_size. The snapshot_type must be set to lvm as this is the only type of snapshot which is supported at the moment. The snapshot_size argument corresponds to the amount of space reserved for the snapshot storage. It must be big enough so all changes performed during the lifetime of the snapshot can be stored, and it must be small enough to fit in the LVM Volume Group. The LVM utilities must be installed for it to work. Naturally the snapshot will automatically be removed at the end of the backup.

You can provide the name of the compression program to use (such as gzip, bzip2 or xz) the default being xz (you must not put the path). Also you can provide extra arguments to be passed to the compression program using compress_opts. The compression program must be installed on the system for this module to work. But as these are very standard programs this should not be a problem.

Example

Here is a full example which shows how to use this module in the configuration:

---
global:
    day_of_week: Sun
    day_of_month: 1
schedules:
    my_schedule:
        daily: 7
        weekly: 4
        monthly: 12
entries:
    virtual-machine-001-img:
        backup_schedule: my_schedule
        backup_type: ModuleBackupBlockCopy
        backup_opts:
            compress_prog: xz
            compress_opts:
                - '-6'
            block_device: /dev/VolGroupKvm/virtual-machine-001
            snapshot_type: lvm
            snapshot_size: 2G
        bakfile_dir: /backup/backup-kvm
        bakfile_owner: root
        bakfile_group: root
        bakfile_mode: 0600
        bakfile_basename: kvmbkp-virtual-machine-001
    windows-disk-img:
        backup_schedule: my_schedule
        backup_type: ModuleBackupBlockCopy
        backup_opts:
            compress_prog: xz
            compress_opts:
                - '-8'
            block_device: /dev/sda1
        bakfile_dir: /backup/backup-win
        bakfile_owner: root
        bakfile_group: root
        bakfile_mode: 0600
        bakfile_basename: windows-disk