Minecraft Backup

[Ryan Leach]

Hey guys,

Been thinking of backup of a minecraft multiplayer server that I'm soon to be relaunching, and was thinking what would be the best way to do offsite versioned backups?

I've seen that some people use git, others have been using rdiff but to be completely honest, I start to get lost when starting to look at the documentation.

So how would I go about setting something like this up?

if using git, how would you go about combining older backups?

--

Ryan

[Steven Pickles]

Hey Ryan,

Normally regarding the merging of binary data, I'd say "here be dragons" but since minecraft  stores each chunk in a separate file, it would probably deal reasonably with it. Tho I'm not sure what kind of interface Git provides for doing this.

Pointless ramblings. But thatsthat's what you get at 5:30am ;)

pix

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[Tim Aslat]

I haven't actually used git, but I suspect that any versioning system
that
can handle binary files would work as well.

My preference would be to use a combination of rsync and ZFS snapshots
which is my current (and several previous) backup system for most of
the
servers I operate.

Assuming you are using a ZFS supported platform a shell script like the
following should work well assuming you have a ZFS fielsystem
available.


#!/bin/sh

RSYNC="path to rsync binary"
ZFS="path to zfs binary"
RSYNC_OPTIONS="-rvPa"
DATE=`date "+%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S"`
SOURCE="<user>@<server>:/path/to/backup/data/"
DESTDIR="/path/to/backup/folder/"
ZFS_FS="pool/filesystem"

# snapshot previous backup
${ZFS} snapshot ${ZFS_FS}@<snapshot
${RSYNC} ${RSYNC_OPTIONS} ${SOURCE} ${DESTDIR}
exit

That's an extremely cutdown version of a script I've been using for a
couple of years now and may require tweaking for your own particular
setup.

Of course, ZFS is a choice. Any filesystem which enables snapshotting
would work in it's place.

Cheers

Tim


--
Tim Aslat
Spyderweb Consulting
E: t...@spyderweb.com.au
P: 0401 088 479

[Paul Schulz]

Have a look at 'bup'. Its based on gits data architectue. Also 'rsnapshot' for rotating backups and back-in-time for somthing similar but with a gui.

On Jul 16, 2012 4:31 AM, "Ryan Leach" <ryan.th...@gmail.com> wrote:

--

[Damien P]

I find rdiff-backup fairly good.  it keeps your most recent copy as ordinary files, and stores differences going back in time.  That way if you don't have access to rdiff-backup, you can at least get your most recent files.  I don't know whether you can delete arbitrary backups with it, but you can delete backups before some date.

Something like Bacula or BackupPC might do scheduling and remote copying for you.

[Ryan Leach]

Ah sorry, just read back through and it seems I missed some details, It's currently being hosted by a shared hosting service, presumably running some form of linux, I wouldn't have a clue if its got access to ZFS.

Unfortunately the hosting service has fairly well locked things down and tried to made it "friendly" to the average minecraft admin as opposed to friendly to people that actually want access to a ssh console, so may have to pull a support ticket just to get a way of running the script(outside running a jar file that I could compile to run the script).

Or change host....

Additionally on a slightly different note, I need to connect to a webhost from the minecraft host, via mysql, on a port other then 3306 without disrupting the current mysql set up too badly, currently I have CPanel access but feel confident that if I talked to the admin I could get SSH or whatever is needed (same admin is currently paying for the minecraft host, but the hosting is done for a third party).

With the versioning I need something relatively simple, as I don't particularly want to be scrounging around looking for documentation should I ever need to restore a backup...


bup was looking promising until I read:
1. bup currently has no features that prune away old backups 

2. This is a very early version. Therefore it will most probably not work for you, but we don't know why. It is also missing some probably-critical features. 

looked at rdiff and rsnapshot and other things but still feel out of my depth.

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 9:57 PM, Damien P <ath...@gmail.com> wrote:

I find rdiff-backup fairly good.  it keeps your most recent copy as ordinary files, and stores differences going back in time.  That way if you don't have access to rdiff-backup, you can at least get your most recent files.  I don't know whether you can delete arbitrary backups with it, but you can delete backups before some date.

Something like Bacula or BackupPC might do scheduling and remote copying for you.

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[Paul Schulz]

Ho do you have access file access to the server? ftp? sftp?

[Ryan Leach]

sftp