backing up to rsync.net
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I am in a bit of a quandary. I need to store backups on rsync.net I have a couple of clients committed to that as a backup repository because they were using it for their off-site backups and other systems previously.
When I raised this issue before, it was suggested I use SSHFS for a borg backup target, which has several problems. It's not guaranteed reliable; the mount point can vanish, and you won't know it. It slows down backup significantly because of the de-duplication and archive validation process.
The structure of SRs is pretty opaque. Looking at the current backup remote file system, It looks like, under xo-vm-backups, a series of directories look like UUIDs. I assume each UUID refers to a specific VM. Under the UUID directories, there are snapshots of each VM (xva), a hash for validating xva file, and a JSON file with parameters for the VM. I suspect that if you have a multi-day set of full backups, there will be multiple trios of files under the same UUID. Looks like I found a case where the backup images are cleaned up properly
I'm assuming (and this may be a bad bet) that the backup data set starting with the UUID is a logically self-contained definition of a preserved VM or VMs. If I place the backup data set. starting with the UUID in an unused remote target, it should be visible via the XO backup restore interface
Would placing a copy of a Borg archive in an unused backup remote target create a restorable image? Assuming my technique works, the next question is how to know that today's backup is done so I can start the remote copy.
Thanks for your help!
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Putting @florent in the loop
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hi @ricky222
the structure of the backup repository is documented here https://github.com/vatesfr/xen-orchestra/tree/master/%40xen-orchestra/backups/docs/VM backups .
Checking if a backup is done/running can be done with the XO rest api from https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/restapi.html
You can go confidently with rsync/rclone for the full backups ( the xva files ). For restoration you can even use the import VM function of XO or xo-cli to directly import the xva. If you rsync data back from rsync to a local backup repository, you must delete the local cache.json.gsz to ensure XO see the downloaded backup (xva + hash + json)
The caveat is for the incremental backup and the merging. In XO we are merging older incremental backups, that means modifying older files. This process is offloaded to another node process which does not appear for now in the api. Making a transfer during a merge may lead to an invalid backup on target.
Do you have enough informations ? Also, it could be great if you share your setup when you have a working/tested setup with rsync
Regards
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@florent, sorry for the long delay in getting back to you. I'm still working on getting Christmas cards out from 2017.
two ideas:
If I can get an assessment of how reliable the rclone mount capability is, I should be able to run a second incremental backup on that mount point. The big problem there is detecting when the rclone mount has failed and halting/restarting the backup once the connection is restored. I have some ideas on how to do this and I want to chew on them a bit for writing them down.
restoration would then become easy because it's just another "network share"
If I am restricted to rsync then it probably would be safer to use full backup and move those upstream. I'm assuming that the full backup file names are the same from creation until expiration. If that's the case, then it'll be much easier to push up because rsync will only push what it does not have at the destination.
Thinking about it, it looks like I will have a lot of storage dedicated to backups, and I might be forced into having just one copy of full disk image backups that I use for the local copy and also replicate it upstream.
thanks for the pointers to the documentation I need.
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FYI, since then, we had the mirror backup features (see https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/mirror_backup.html)
I know it's not solving your rsync.net requirement, but it might be an interesting solution to explore to backup/archive to any S3 capable provider.
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@olivierlambert that does look interesting. I really need to find a way to make it work over scp/sftp unless you have an in with rsync.net and can get them to add an S3-compatible service
It's not really practical to make a move to an S3 provider at this time; we are 230 TB into rsync.net for a damn good price with no extra charges for data ingress or egress. If I add VM backup, the additional 10+ terabytes are a drop in the bucket of the overall usage.
