Hackery

Backup Regimes with Brackup

Wed 20 Jan 2010

After using brackup for a while you find you have a big list of backups sitting on your server, and start to think about cleaning up some of the older ones. The standard brackup tool for this is brackup-target, and the prune and gc (garbage collection) subcommands.

Typical usage is something like this:

# List the backups for a particular target on the server e.g.
TARGET=myserver_images
brackup-target $TARGET list-backups
Backup File                      Backup Date                      Size (B)
-----------                      -----------                      --------
images-1262106544                Thu 31 Dec 2009 03:32:49          1263128
images-1260632447                Sun 13 Dec 2009 08:19:13          1168281
images-1250042378                Wed 25 Nov 2009 06:25:06           977464
images-1239323644                Mon 09 Nov 2009 00:30:34           846523
images-1239577352                Thu 29 Oct 2009 13:03:02           846523
...

# Decide how many backups you want to keep, and prune (delete) the rest
brackup-target --keep-backups 15 $TARGET prune

# Prune just removes the brackup files on the server, so now you need to
# run a garbage collect to delete any 'chunks' that are now orphaned
brackup-target --interactive $TARGET gc

This simple scheme - "keep the last N backups" - works pretty nicely for backups you do relatively infrequently. If you do more frequent backups, however, you might find yourself wanting to be able to implement more sophisticated retention policies. Traditional backup regimes often involve policies like this:

keep the last 2 weeks of daily backups
keep the last 8 weekly backups
keep monthly backups forever

It's not necessarily obvious how to do something like this with brackup, but it's actually pretty straightforward. The trick is to define multiple 'sources' in your brackup.conf, one for each backup 'level' you want to use. For instance, to implement the regime above, you might define the following:

# Daily backups
[SOURCE:images]
path = /data/images
...

# Weekly backups
[SOURCE:images-weekly]
path = /data/images
...

# Monthly backups
[SOURCE:images-monthly]
path = /data/images
...

You'd then use the images-monthly source once a month, the images-weekly source once a week, and the images source the rest of the time. Your list of backups would then look something like this:

Backup File                      Backup Date                      Size (B)
-----------                      -----------                      --------
images-1234567899                Sat 05 Dec 2009 03:32:49          1263128
images-1234567898                Fri 04 Dec 2009 03:19:13          1168281
images-1234567897                Thu 03 Dec 2009 03:19:13          1168281
images-1234567896                Wed 02 Dec 2009 03:19:13          1168281
images-monthly-1234567895        Tue 01 Dec 2009 03:19:13          1168281
images-1234567894                Mon 30 Nov 2009 03:19:13          1168281
images-weekly-1234567893         Sun 29 Nov 2009 03:19:13          1168281
images-1234567892                Sat 28 Nov 2009 03:25:06           977464
...

And when you prune, you want to specify a --source argument, and specify separate --keep-backups settings for each level e.g. for the above:

# Keep 2 weeks worth of daily backups
brackup-target --source images --keep-backups 12 $TARGET prune

# Keep 8 weeks worth of weekly backups
brackup-target --source images-weekly --keep-backups 8 $TARGET prune

# Keep all monthly backups, so we don't prune them at all

# And then garbage collect as normal
brackup-target --interactive $TARGET gc