Simple backups with RSnapShot

The goal is to create a complete duplicate of your server (files and mysql). To achieve this, we will use rsnapshot a filesystem snapshot utility, written in PERL, for making backups of local and remote systems using ssh and rsync.

Rsnapshot is using hard link to create differencial backups from the first full backup.

1. Installing rsnapshot (00:00)

apt-get install rsnapshot

2. Configuring rsnapshot (00:13)

The main configuration file is /etc/rsnapshot.yml. You can use a specific configuration file for your daily/weekly/monthly backups if needed.

The configuration is pretty simple but very strict : always use tabs delimitaters instead of spaces for the options and directories need a trailing slash at the end.

You can get my configuration file from this url

backup_script  /usr/bin/ssh root@domain.com 'mysqldump -uroot -ppassword --all-databases --single-transaction | gzip --rsyncable' > all.sql.gz mysql/  
backup root@domain.com:/      files/  

These command copy all you production server files and dump all your databases using mysqldump tool.

If you prefer to get separate files for each databases, you can use a shell script which need to be installed on the production server.

wget http://bash.cyberciti.biz/dl/408.sh.zip
unzip 408.sh.zip
mv 408.sh rsnapshot.mysql

Edit the script to specify the output directory to save the mysql backup

BAKRSNROOT=/backup/mysql

/etc/rsnapshot.yml :

backup_script   /usr/bin/ssh root@domain.com '/root/rsnapshot.mysql'    unused1/  
backup root@domain.com:/backup/mysql/      files/  

We are adding the second line because the script is saving mysql datas to the prod server.

3. Test your configuration file (1:28)

You can simply test the configuration file using this command :

rsnapshot configtest

4. Set up the cronjob (1:34)

We want to run our backups everyday at midnight. If an error occured, we will receive an email with all informations :

0 0 * * * rsnapshot daily > /tmp/rsnapshot.out 2>&1 || cat /tmp/rsnapshot.out | mail -s "Backups failed on `hostname`" user@domain.com < /dev/null

5. Create a script to get daily emails when backup is done (1:58)

If you are a Campfire user and want to get chat notifications when backups are done, just add this command to your cronjob :

curl -i -u $KEY:X -H 'Content-Type:application/json' -d
"{\"message\":{\"body\":\"Backups finished\"}}" CAMPFIRE_URL