Alpine remote backup (RBU) is a set of scripts based on LBU (Alpine Local Backup). It consist of a main script which need to be run from cron and a set of profiles which can be used as pre/post scripts for LBU. The idea of profiles is to simplify the backup process and to make sure services inside Alpine infrastructure are setup in a similar way. Some of the features/profiles of RBU are:
- Dump databases to a cache directory
- Synchronise backups to remote location
- Copy backup status log to remote location
- Send status notifications over mqtt
The alpine-backup script itself takes care of capturing the logs, creating the snapshot, and updating the status for monitoring. Other tasks such uploading the backup should be done through profiles. See the Minimal Setup section for details.
- POSIX shell
- LBU (default on Alpine installation)
- rsync
apk add rsync - mosquitto-pub
apk add mosquitto-clients
RBU needs a configuration file named rbu.conf. This configuration should
(by default) be put in the lbu configuration directory /etc/lbu. Inside this
configuration should be a list of exported configuration variables which are
needed for lbu and its pre/post scripts to function properly.
Profiles are a set of LBU pre/post scripts. To use these scripts you should symlink (or copy) them from the profile directory to one of the following dirs:
/etc/lbu/pre-package.d(scripts run before LBU creates its backup)/etc/lbu/post-package.d(scripts run after LBU created its backup)
These profiles/scripts will be run by busybox run-parts which means they cannot
have an extension and need to be executable. If you need to run these scripts
in a specific order you should prefix them with a number like 10-scriptname.
The profiles/ directory contains some default profiles which can be used to
setup basic back-ups.
At the minimum, you want to add the backup-sync script in the post-package.d
directory to actually upload the backup archive to the remote server in the
homedir of the user provided in rbu.conf.
backup-list can be placed in the pre-package.d directory to generate a list
of files that are being backed up, which will added to the log.
To make sure the backups are safe we use openssl encryption option provided by
LBU. Please make sure you provide a secure password in rbu.conf and make sure
you have a backup of that password in case you will need it when restoring.
By default LBU will only backup files located in the /etc directory and have
been modified. To include other files you need to lbu_include files and
directories. Exclusion is possible via lbu_exclude. Please check
Alpine wiki for more
information regarding LBU usage.
Backups will be kept in the specified backup location in rbu.conf. After the
backup is successful these backups will be rsynced to the remote backup server.
To be able to automatically rsync backups a ssh key needs to be generated per
backup. For generating a Ed25519 key exec: ssh-keygen -t ed25519 and copy the
public key to the backup server.
Copy the provided alpine-backup to /etc/periodic/daily to make the backup
run every night.
LBU is configured to keep 7 days of backups. If you also want a monthly backup,
enable the backup-archive profile in post-package.d and make sure that it's
run after the backup-sync profile. This will copy the last created backup at
the first of each month to the month/ directory..
Backups are are automatically monitored by Alpine monitoring system. After the backup has finished it will send a message with metadata to our mqtt server which will be picked up by Alpine monitoring system.
Older version of LBU have a bug which prevents the cleanup of older local encrypted backups. see: https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/alpine-conf/commit/?id=cd395b