# 011-backups

_October 12, 2021_

My usual take on server backups is "don't put anything worth
backing up on the server that's not stored in git elsewhere".

This has treated me pretty well in the past. Source code,
configuration files, and even documentation on setup are all
stored in git both on the server and on my laptop, and so
I can sleep at night knowing a catastrophic disk failure wouldn't
mean I lost any serious work.

This strategy breaks down when thinking about a tilde. First,
the array of services we're providing is _much_ more complex
than my normal blog server. Second, there are more people
involved!

I want to guarantee any tilde members that I will at least try
my best to keep backups of their data in case of failure or
accidental deletion.

There are tons of backup tools, but a lot of them are fairly
complex (with good reason I suppose.. compression, deduplication,
etc). Since this tilde is about exploring OpenBSD, I took the
opportunity to home-roll a simple backup solution with dump(8)
and restore(8).

The meat of it is in a script I'm calling "dumpster" that runs
via cron with the day of the week (1-7) as the dump level
and a weekly job dumping the whole system fresh:

	#!/bin/sh
	# dumpster -- taking out the garbash with dump(8)
	
	# %u is 1=mon 7=sun (unless given in ARGV)
	LVL=${1:-"$(date +%u)"}
	BAKDIR="/bak/$(date +%F)_$LVL"
	
	mkdir -p "$BAKDIR"
	dump -$LVL -auf "$BAKDIR/root.dump.$LVL" /
	dump -$LVL -auf "$BAKDIR/home.dump.$LVL" /home
	dump -$LVL -auf "$BAKDIR/var.dump.$LVL" /var

This dumps to /bak, which is a separate Linode Volume, which
has better data redundancy guarantees than the VPS volume and
can be detached/attached to other hosts in the event of VPS
failure.

As you can see, I'm only really dumping areas that have user
data (/var for git, /home, and / for configs). /usr/\* can be
rebuilt from /var/backups/pkglist for the most part!

A note to anyone trying this: the Linode Volume was a bit hacky
to get set up, since it expects to be mounting against a Linux
machine. Linode's console will error on attaching, but I found
that rebooting the host made the drive appear as wdN and from
there I was able to format it, etc.

As a bonus, I took the opportunity to set up /altroot backups,
which is a brilliantly simple way to ensure you can boot into
a known-good state of your host even if something goes very
wrong with the main drive!

Overall, I went from a backup-avoider to a backup-fan in the
process :) it's so cool to watch the daily script create dump
files of things that changed!