tgharold / abu

Attic Backup wrapper script for nightly backups

abu

Attic backup wrapper script for regular backups. Attic is a deduplicating backup program, supporting compression and encryption.

Motivation

Attic is an awesome backup utility; however it is only the backup tool. This script wraps attic into a simple to use function that can be run regularly to maintain an ongoing backup repository, including pruning of old backups.

Abu is a double-acronym for "Attic BackUp" and "Another Backup Utility"

Installation

Dependencies

• attic: http://attic-backup.org

Steps

The basic installation process is very basic:

• Obtain source code: git clone git://github.com/NaturesOrganics/abu.git
• Change to cloned directory: cd abu
• Install: make install

Initial Configuration

A configuration file template will be installed to /etc/abu.conf as part of the make install above. This is a template only; you need to adjust to suit your needs.

• Set the backup destination in the attic_repo option
• Update the include_paths to make sure you're backing up the right data
• Optional: configure encryption using the attic_key option

Once you have setup your configuration file, you need to run abu -i to initialize the repository. This is a one-time task.

Configuration Paths

Abu will look for a config file in $HOME/.abu.conf and /etc/abu.conf, using whichever file it finds first.

Scheduling

Once you've got abu installed, configured and your repository initialize, you are probably ready to schedule regular backups. To backup every hour, on the hour, add something like this to your crontab:

0 * * * * /usr/local/sbin/abu

To avoid all your hosts hitting the same backup target at the same time (if your infrastructure is setup that way), use the -d option to set the maximum time to delay the backup. No delay will be introduced unless you pass the -d option to abu.

Introduce a random delay up to 300 seconds (5 minutes):

0 * * * * /usr/local/sbin/abu -d 300

Destination Targets

You can backup directly to a locally mounted file-system (eg, local disk, USB, NFS etc), or backup over SSH to a remote host.

IMPORTANT: When backing up to a remote host using SSH, the remote host must also have attic installed.

Sample ssh_config file if backing up over SSH:

Host attic.example.com
  Hostname mybackupserver.example.com
  Protocol 2
  Port 22
  User attic
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa-attic
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  # prevent display of motd
  LogLevel QUIET