[Users] Ploop Incremental backups strategy

[tranxene50]

Hello!

Please forgive my bad English, I live in France.

A few years ago, as a hobby in the beginning, I created a file based 
"incremental" backup tool (that heavily relies on rsync) : 
https://www.openvz-diff-backups.fr

It works flawlessly with OpenVZ 6 but only have been rapidly tested with 
OpenVZ 7.

The main difference between OpenVZ 6 and 7 is that memory dump 
(checkpoint) is now done using CRIU instead of OpenVZ "Legacy" kernel.

But,  globally, the process is still the same: create a ploop snapshot, 
mount it, sync it (with rsync) and then create a "diff" backup (using 
rsync again with --link-dest).

As far as I know, this is one of the rarest GPL tools (any hint 
appreciated!) able to backup/restore CT files and, most importantly, 
full memory state.

Restoring a "live" backup is like resuming an OS (Windows, Linux, MacOS, 
etc) after it had been put to sleep: the container will resume and works 
again, just like nothing had happen.

So you can cheat and pretend 100% uptime even if a container was down 
most of the time... (evidently this a joke and, please, do not play at 
this game: /var/log/* will betray you)

Note: to migrate CT between OpenVZ 6 and 7, you must use "cold" backups 
because memory dumps are incompatible (OpenVZ Kernel vs CRIU).

To answer your questions:

1) you can restore any previous backup because each one is considered as 
a full backup (no diff/incremental computing: it is just 
files/directories/other - and hard links)

2) because backups are just a bunch of files (and mostly hard links), 
you can easily browse any backup of a CT and copy any files/directories 
needed

At the moment, development of openvz-diff-backups is on pause - because 
it fulfills all my needs with OpenVZ 6 - but I am in the process of 
moving to OpenVZ 7 in a few months.

So, if you encounter a bug or an issue, please leave me a message: the 
tool has a very conservative approach and is designed to cleanly stop if 
anything unexpected/unknown/abnormal happens.

Have a nice day!

Le 08/09/2020 à 14:24, mailinglist at tikklik.nl a écrit :
> Hello,
>
> Using openvz7
> Im looking ad my backup strategy
> I allways used rsync on openvz6
> And looks like on openvz7 this can also be done on /vz/root/VEID
> But i dont know if i can do a full restore from that...
>
>
> Now im looking at snapshots
> https://github.com/TamCore/vzpbackup
> it can make full backups and incremental backups
>
> Is someone using this script?
> i have some question hope someone can help
>
> the incremental backups are nice to save space and time on a remote
> backupserver
> But how does a restore works.
> For what i know you can only restore a full snapshot, the incremental
> backups have only the changed files
>
> Question 2.
> Is it possible to extract a file from the backup for a single file restore?
> And if so can someone tell me how?
>
>
> Thanxs
> Steffan
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Users at openvz.org
> https://lists.openvz.org/mailman/listinfo/users

-- 
tranxene50
tranxene50 at openvz-diff-backups.fr