backup concept

[Sven Gehr]

Hello, everyone,

I would like to revise my previous backup concept. First of all a description of the environment and the previous concept:

As virtualization host I use Proxmox VE. Various virtual machines run on it:

- PFSense
- Linux server (Samba-ADS, LDAP, file server, CUPS, DHPC ..)
- Linux server (groupware in MariaDB)
- Windows VM for specialist applications (MSSQL Express)

The PFSense can be neglected because I create an image after the setup and nothing changes after that. And when I make an adjustment I manually create an image again.

Besides that there is a second physical backup server (Linux) on which I have Bareos-Backup running. On all the above VM's I have set up the Bareos client accordingly. So I backup according to the generation principle (Pools: Daily, Weekly, Monthly).

This allows me to access various versions of a file if it was accidentally deleted and it is not immediately noticed. It becomes problematic when a VM - for whatever reason - suddenly refuses to boot. Or there is an error in the groupware (database). As far as I know the backup with Bareos is not consistent with databases (MSSQL, MariaDB, LDAP ...) ... correct me if this is wrong.

Now I think about how I can do this better. Especially since fast restore of a whole VM. In Proxmox there is the possibility to create backups of the whole VM. This also works automatically and on a separate storage. Because there is always a dump of the VM (even with a short stop) I have a consistent system afterwards. But also each time completely.

I could e.g. provide an additional 8TB-storage on the backup-server and backup a dump of each VM from Mon-Fri which will be overwritten after one week. But this is completely isolated from my Bareos backup and with the dumps I don't have the possibility to restore an accidental deletion of a mail from the groupware system (which is located in the MariaDB).

How do I design my backup in the most sensible way? Is my concept possibly completely crap? Are there any good documentation on how I can best set it up?

It would be nice if you could give me some tips.

with best

sven

[Andreas Haase]

Hi Sven,

Am 15.04.2020 um 13:57 schrieb Sven Gehr <sven...@gmail.com>:

How do I design my backup in the most sensible way? Is my concept possibly completely crap? Are there any good documentation on how I can best set it up?

I guess, your concept isn’t that crappy and you identified the problematic parts quite well. Now it is important to address the problems in a way, that fits best for you. I would divide the concept into backup (restore things as files) and disaster recovery (make a VM or server boot again). And of course you have to make sure, your backups are consistent and restorable.

For disaster recovery there is ReaR mentioned in documentation as an example. Take a look at https://docs.bareos.org/Appendix/DisasterRecoveryUsingBareos.html.

MariaDB as well as MySQL I would backup using mysqlhotcopy (or mysqldump, depending on your storage engine) and binary logs. Using the binary logs you are able to do a so called point in time recovery. And If that doesn’t your current restore requirement, you can create the database anew with the hotcopy or dump.

Cheers,

Andreas