[Users] Ploop Incremental backups strategy

Sat Sep 12 04:35:28 MSK 2020

Hello Steffan.

To quickly answer your questions:

1) every successful backup is considered as a full backup, even if it is 
an "incremental/differential/full" backup under the hood (I know, this 
is counter intuitive)

In short, you do not have to care about choosing which backup you want 
to restore because there is no computation to "rebuild" a backup.

2) "openvz-diff-backups --help" will show you all options

You are right, the doc is missing: I have spent 99% of my time working 
on the code - and testing it - but only 1% to "build" a simple single 
website page ...

3) there is no intrinsic performance differences between push or pull 
modes: it only depends of the hardware that your are using

But your question was about "external" servers having access to your 
backup server => use "pull" mode.

This means that every client should save all backups on their own 
servers and, once it is done, you can download them on your backup server.

If this is not possible, create a container to accept their backups 
(push) and another container to "pull" these backups.

*WARNING AGAIN*: never, ever, store OVZDB backups in a container using 
Ploop layout: please, use bindfs to mount a directory from the host into 
the container

Have a good night!

Le 11/09/2020 à 16:05, tranxene50 a écrit :
> Hello Steffan.
>
> I am writing a "survival" guide in English: please let me some time to 
> finish it. ;-)
>
> Have a nice day!
>
> Le 11/09/2020 à 15:53, mailinglist at tikklik.nl a écrit :
>> Thanx, im looking in to it, it looks very nice Im missing some 
>> documentation so i have some quastions...
>>
>> 1)
>> So if you take live backups
>> Then the seccond backup is incremental any you can in case of 
>> emergancy take the last incremental backup to restore the whole CT?
>>
>> 2) in your cron you use this, " -l 6 -q" can you explain what that does?
>>
>> 3)Push and pull
>> I miss documentation how to setup.
>> Have you any experiance in performance on push vs pull On my own 
>> nodes i can install the script on the live node But i also have 
>> clients with nodes i backup, but i dont want them to give access 
>> directly tot he backup server.
>>
>> 4) at night i want to backup, from tha main backup server to a remote 
>> sitelocation
>>      In case of a big desaster 😊
>>     what do i need tor sync?
>>     Everything with a date file/map name?
>>    and include the data dir?
>>
>> Mayby for the future the option to pull the last update to a remote 
>> server 😊
>>
>> Thanxs for the time.
>>
>> Steffan
>>
>> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
>> Van: users-bounces at openvz.org <users-bounces at openvz.org> Namens 
>> tranxene50
>> Verzonden: woensdag 9 september 2020 01:02
>> Aan: users at openvz.org
>> Onderwerp: Re: [Users] Ploop Incremental backups strategy
>>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Users mailing list
>>> Users at openvz.org
>>> https://lists.openvz.org/mailman/listinfo/users
>> -- 
>> tranxene50
>> tranxene50 at openvz-diff-backups.fr
>>
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-- 
tranxene50
tranxene50 at openvz-diff-backups.fr