Backup strategies: Here's mine. What's yours?

Every now and then I start asking some of the people I know and work with about their backup strategies.  I thought it was time for me to share my backup strategy.

I have several systems that I use throughout my house but, they all follow the same basic strategy:

• daily backups of each computer to a storage device in my home network
• daily backups of my local storage device to a remove location

I use two different tools for the job:
Déjà Dup

Backupninja

In the following paragraphs, I will provide more details on how I currently backup my main laptop.

My main computer uses Déjà Dup to backup my home directory and saves to a shared network drive via SSH.  This gives me the flexibility of backing up to my drive ( at home ) from anywhere where I have network connectivity.

Let's go through this in a bit more detail:

Backup Drive

First things first.  Let's get a drive in which to backup our data.  I have a 2TB USB drive attached to one of my servers that I make available via SSH to my local network.

Here are the steps that I took to get the drive connected, partitioned, formatted, mounted and available:

• Connect drive to any available USB port on your server.
• Make sure to turn the power on your USB drive :)
• On my server, the USB drive showed up as /dev/sdd1 as there is an existing partition there
• Let's partition the drive with cfdisk  ( Please read the manual for cfdisk BEFORE doing anything with cfdisk. )
• sudo cfdisk /dev/sdd ( notice that I am working with the entire drive here and not just the partition )
• delete any partitions in the drive and create one ext4 partition that uses the entire drive.
• Use the menu items at the bottom to delete the existing partitions
• When you create a new partition, cfdisk will default to create a partition using all available space, keep those defaults
• The linux partition type is 83 ( cfdisk should default to this but, just in case you need it )
• Make sure to Write the changes to disk

At this point, you should have a new partition on your backup drive:

• In my case, my USB drive was recognized as /dev/sdd.
• I created one partition on that drive.
• The above tells me that my partition should be /dev/sdd1

Let's format our partition to get things going:

• sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdd1

Alas!  We have a partition ready for use.  Let's mount it ( mine is mounted on /media/Backup1 ):

• sudo mkdir -p /media/Backup1
• sudo mount /dev/sdd1 /media/Backup1

If you've made it this far, you should now have a new "mount point" where you can access your backup drive.  Let's verify that by checking what partitions have been mounted:

• df -h
• The backup drive should be listed there as one of the partitions.  Here is what the relevant part of mine looks like:
• /dev/sdd1                1.8T  466G  1.3T  27% /media/Backup1

The last part on getting the Backup drive ready is to ensure that it can be accessed from your network.  In my case, i have a username on all of the boxes that can access the backup server via SSH key.  I also ensure that /media/Backup1 is owned by this username:

• sudo chown -R negronjl:negronjl /media/Backup1 
• ( Feel free to use whatever username you want for the above )

Déjà Dup

• I use Ubuntu on my systems so, I already have Déjà Dup installed and only need to configure a few things to get going
• Open the dash ( Super key ) and type backup.  Déjà Dup will be in that list under the name of Backup.
• Click on Backup.
• My Déjà Dup configuration looks something like:
• Storage tab:
• Backup location: SSH
• Server: <my backup server>
• Port: 22
• Folder: /media/Backup1/DejaDup
• Username: <negronjl> Use whatever username you used in the previous step
• The Folders tab:
• Folders to back up: <home directory>
• Folders to ignore: Trash, Downloads
• In the above setting, feel free to add any folder already being backed up or that needs to be ignored.
• Schedule:
• How often to back up: Daily
• Keep backups: At least 28 days ( This can be changed )
• Close the window ... everything should be up and running now.

Backupninja

I use backupninja to backup my entire machine in case of catastrophic failure.  Here is how to set up and configure backupninja:

• sudo apt-get install backupninja

This is what my backupninja configuration file looks like:

• when = everyday at 01
  options = --s3-use-new-style
  nicelevel = 19
  testconnect = no
  tmpdir = /home/backupninja/tmp
  [gpg]
  sign = yes
  encryptkey = <your GPG key>
  password = <your GPG key password>
  [source]
  include = /etc
  include = /home
  include = /opt
  include = /usr/local
  include = /root
  exclude = /home/*/.gvfs
  exclude = /home/*/.Private
  exclude = /home/.ecryptfs
  [dest]
  incremental = yes
  increments = 30
  keep = 60
  desturl = rsync://<backup_username>@<backup_server>//media/Backup1/Backups/backupninja/negronjl-laptop/negronjl-laptop
  awsaccesskeyid = <YOUR_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID>
  awssecretaccesskey = <YOUR_AWS_SECRET_KEY>

Adapt the above file to suit your needs ( usernames, passwords and such ) and save it to /etc/backup.d as something like <number>-<name>.dup Where <number> determines the order of execution of the files in the /etc/backup.d/ directory and <name> is an identifying name for the file ( something that tells you what the file is/does ).  As an example, my backupninja configuration file is named: 

• 93-negronjl-laptop-local.dup

I'd love to hear your backup strategies ...