Cedar Backup 2 Software Manual

Kenneth J. Pronovici

Copyright © 2005-2008,2013-2015 Kenneth J. Pronovici

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Table of Contents

Preface

    Purpose
    Audience
    Conventions Used in This Book

        Typographic Conventions
        Icons

    Organization of This Manual
    Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

    What is Cedar Backup?
    Migrating from Version 2 to Version 3
    How to Get Support
    History

2. Basic Concepts

    General Architecture
    Data Recovery
    Cedar Backup Pools
    The Backup Process

        The Collect Action
        The Stage Action
        The Store Action
        The Purge Action
        The All Action
        The Validate Action
        The Initialize Action
        The Rebuild Action

    Coordination between Master and Clients
    Managed Backups
    Media and Device Types
    Incremental Backups
    Extensions

3. Installation

    Background
    Installing on a Debian System
    Installing from Source

        Installing Dependencies
        Installing the Source Package

4. Command Line Tools

    Overview
    The cback command

        Introduction
        Syntax
        Switches
        Actions

    The cback-amazons3-sync command

        Introduction
        Syntax
        Switches

    The cback-span command

        Introduction
        Syntax
        Switches
        Using cback-span
        Sample run

5. Configuration

    Overview
    Configuration File Format

        Sample Configuration File
        Reference Configuration
        Options Configuration
        Peers Configuration
        Collect Configuration
        Stage Configuration
        Store Configuration
        Purge Configuration
        Extensions Configuration

    Setting up a Pool of One

        Step 1: Decide when you will run your backup.
        Step 2: Make sure email works.
        Step 3: Configure your writer device.
        Step 4: Configure your backup user.
        Step 5: Create your backup tree.
        Step 6: Create the Cedar Backup configuration file.
        Step 7: Validate the Cedar Backup configuration file.
        Step 8: Test your backup.
        Step 9: Modify the backup cron jobs.

    Setting up a Client Peer Node

        Step 1: Decide when you will run your backup.
        Step 2: Make sure email works.
        Step 3: Configure the master in your backup pool.
        Step 4: Configure your backup user.
        Step 5: Create your backup tree.
        Step 6: Create the Cedar Backup configuration file.
        Step 7: Validate the Cedar Backup configuration file.
        Step 8: Test your backup.
        Step 9: Modify the backup cron jobs.

    Setting up a Master Peer Node

        Step 1: Decide when you will run your backup.
        Step 2: Make sure email works.
        Step 3: Configure your writer device.
        Step 4: Configure your backup user.
        Step 5: Create your backup tree.
        Step 6: Create the Cedar Backup configuration file.
        Step 7: Validate the Cedar Backup configuration file.
        Step 8: Test connectivity to client machines.
        Step 9: Test your backup.
        Step 10: Modify the backup cron jobs.

    Configuring your Writer Device

        Device Types
        Devices identified by by device name
        Devices identified by SCSI id
        Linux Notes
        Finding your Linux CD Writer
        Mac OS X Notes

    Optimized Blanking Stategy

6. Official Extensions

    System Information Extension
    Amazon S3 Extension
    Subversion Extension
    MySQL Extension
    PostgreSQL Extension
    Mbox Extension
    Encrypt Extension
    Split Extension
    Capacity Extension

A. Extension Architecture Interface
B. Dependencies
C. Data Recovery

    Finding your Data
    Recovering Filesystem Data

        Full Restore
        Partial Restore

    Recovering MySQL Data
    Recovering Subversion Data
    Recovering Mailbox Data
    Recovering Data split by the Split Extension

D. Securing Password-less SSH Connections
E. Copyright

Preface

Table of Contents

Purpose
Audience
Conventions Used in This Book

    Typographic Conventions
    Icons

Organization of This Manual
Acknowledgments

Purpose

This software manual has been written to document version 2 of Cedar Backup,
originally released in early 2005.

Audience

This manual has been written for computer-literate administrators who need to
use and configure Cedar Backup on their Linux or UNIX-like system. The examples
in this manual assume the reader is relatively comfortable with UNIX and
command-line interfaces.

Conventions Used in This Book

This section covers the various conventions used in this manual.

Typographic Conventions

Term

    Used for first use of important terms.

Command

    Used for commands, command output, and switches

Replaceable

    Used for replaceable items in code and text

Filenames

    Used for file and directory names

Icons

Note

This icon designates a note relating to the surrounding text.

Tip

This icon designates a helpful tip relating to the surrounding text.

Warning

This icon designates a warning relating to the surrounding text.

Organization of This Manual

Chapter 1, Introduction

    Provides some some general history about Cedar Backup, what needs it is
    intended to meet, how to get support, and how to migrate from version 2 to
    version 3.

Chapter 2, Basic Concepts

    Discusses the basic concepts of a Cedar Backup infrastructure, and
    specifies terms used throughout the rest of the manual.

Chapter 3, Installation

    Explains how to install the Cedar Backup package either from the Python
    source distribution or from the Debian package.

Chapter 4, Command Line Tools

    Discusses the various Cedar Backup command-line tools, including the
    primary cback command.

Chapter 5, Configuration

    Provides detailed information about how to configure Cedar Backup.

Chapter 6, Official Extensions

    Describes each of the officially-supported Cedar Backup extensions.

Appendix A, Extension Architecture Interface

    Specifies the Cedar Backup extension architecture interface, through which
    third party developers can write extensions to Cedar Backup.

Appendix B, Dependencies

    Provides some additional information about the packages which Cedar Backup
    relies on, including information about how to find documentation and
    packages on non-Debian systems.

Appendix C, Data Recovery

    Cedar Backup provides no facility for restoring backups, assuming the
    administrator can handle this infrequent task. This appendix provides some
    notes for administrators to work from.

Appendix D, Securing Password-less SSH Connections

    Password-less SSH connections are a necessary evil when remote backup
    processes need to execute without human interaction. This appendix
    describes some ways that you can reduce the risk to your backup pool should
    your master machine be compromised.

Acknowledgments

The structure of this manual and some of the basic boilerplate has been taken
from the book Version Control with Subversion. Thanks to the authors (and
O'Reilly) for making this excellent reference available under a free and open
license.

Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents

What is Cedar Backup?
Migrating from Version 2 to Version 3
How to Get Support
History

    ?Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on
    ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.?? Linus Torvalds, at the
    release of Linux 2.0.8 in July of 1996.

What is Cedar Backup?

Cedar Backup is a software package designed to manage system backups for a pool
of local and remote machines. Cedar Backup understands how to back up
filesystem data as well as MySQL and PostgreSQL databases and Subversion
repositories. It can also be easily extended to support other kinds of data
sources.

Cedar Backup is focused around weekly backups to a single CD or DVD disc, with
the expectation that the disc will be changed or overwritten at the beginning
of each week. If your hardware is new enough (and almost all hardware is
today), Cedar Backup can write multisession discs, allowing you to add
incremental data to a disc on a daily basis.

Alternately, Cedar Backup can write your backups to the Amazon S3 cloud rather
than relying on physical media.

Besides offering command-line utilities to manage the backup process, Cedar
Backup provides a well-organized library of backup-related functionality,
written in the Python 2 programming language.

There are many different backup software implementations out there in the open
source world. Cedar Backup aims to fill a niche: it aims to be a good fit for
people who need to back up a limited amount of important data on a regular
basis. Cedar Backup isn't for you if you want to back up your huge MP3
collection every night, or if you want to back up a few hundred machines.
However, if you administer a small set of machines and you want to run daily
incremental backups for things like system configuration, current email, small
web sites, Subversion or Mercurial repositories, or small MySQL databases, then
Cedar Backup is probably worth your time.

Cedar Backup has been developed on a Debian GNU/Linux system and is primarily
supported on Debian and other Linux systems. However, since it is written in
portable Python 2, it should run without problems on just about any UNIX-like
operating system. In particular, full Cedar Backup functionality is known to
work on Debian and SuSE Linux systems, and client functionality is also known
to work on FreeBSD and Mac OS X systems.

To run a Cedar Backup client, you really just need a working Python 2
installation. To run a Cedar Backup master, you will also need a set of other
executables, most of which are related to building and writing CD/DVD images or
talking to the Amazon S3 infrastructure. A full list of dependencies is
provided in the section called ?Installing Dependencies?.

Migrating from Version 2 to Version 3

The main difference between Cedar Backup version 2 and Cedar Backup version 3
is the targeted Python interpreter. Cedar Backup version 2 was designed for
Python 2, while version 3 is a conversion of the original code to Python 3.
Other than that, both versions are functionally equivalent. The configuration
format is unchanged, and you can mix-and-match masters and clients of different
versions in the same backup pool. Both versions will be fully supported until
around the time of the Python 2 end-of-life in 2020, but you should plan to
migrate sooner than that if possible.

A major design goal for version 3 was to facilitate easy migration testing for
users, by making it possible to install version 3 on the same server where
version 2 was already in use. A side effect of this design choice is that all
of the executables, configuration files, and logs changed names in version 3.
Where version 2 used "cback", version 3 uses "cback3": cback3.conf instead of
cback.conf, cback3.log instead of cback.log, etc.

So, while migrating from version 2 to version 3 is relatively straightforward,
you will have to make some changes manually. You will need to create a new
configuration file (or soft link to the old one), modify your cron jobs to use
the new executable name, etc. You can migrate one server at a time in your pool
with no ill effects, or even incrementally migrate a single server by using
version 2 and version 3 on different days of the week or for different parts of
the backup.

How to Get Support

Cedar Backup is open source software that is provided to you at no cost. It is
provided with no warranty, not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. However, that said, someone can usually help you solve
whatever problems you might see.

If you experience a problem, your best bet is to file an issue in the issue
tracker at BitBucket. ^[1] When the source code was hosted at SourceForge,
there was a mailing list. However, it was very lightly used in the last years
before I abandoned SourceForge, and I have decided not to replace it.

If you are not comfortable discussing your problem in public or listing it in a
public database, or if you need to send along information that you do not want
made public, then you can write <support@cedar-solutions.com>. That mail will
go directly to me. If you write the support address about a bug, a ?scrubbed?
bug report will eventually end up in the public bug database anyway, so if at
all possible you should use the public reporting mechanisms. One of the
strengths of the open-source software development model is its transparency.

Regardless of how you report your problem, please try to provide as much
information as possible about the behavior you observed and the environment in
which the problem behavior occurred. ^[2]

In particular, you should provide: the version of Cedar Backup that you are
using; how you installed Cedar Backup (i.e. Debian package, source package,
etc.); the exact command line that you executed; any error messages you
received, including Python stack traces (if any); and relevant sections of the
Cedar Backup log. It would be even better if you could describe exactly how to
reproduce the problem, for instance by including your entire configuration file
and/or specific information about your system that might relate to the problem.
However, please do not provide huge sections of debugging logs unless you are
sure they are relevant or unless someone asks for them.

Tip

Sometimes, the error that Cedar Backup displays can be rather cryptic. This is
because under internal error conditions, the text related to an exception might
get propogated all of the way up to the user interface. If the message you
receive doesn't make much sense, or if you suspect that it results from an
internal error, you might want to re-run Cedar Backup with the --stack option.
This forces Cedar Backup to dump the entire Python stack trace associated with
the error, rather than just printing the last message it received. This is good
information to include along with a bug report, as well.

History

Cedar Backup began life in late 2000 as a set of Perl scripts called kbackup.
These scripts met an immediate need (which was to back up skyjammer.com and
some personal machines) but proved to be unstable, overly verbose and rather
difficult to maintain.

In early 2002, work began on a rewrite of kbackup. The goal was to address many
of the shortcomings of the original application, as well as to clean up the
code and make it available to the general public. While doing research related
to code I could borrow or base the rewrite on, I discovered that there was
already an existing backup package with the name kbackup, so I decided to
change the name to Cedar Backup instead.

Because I had become fed up with the prospect of maintaining a large volume of
Perl code, I decided to abandon that language in favor of Python. ^[3] At the
time, I chose Python mostly because I was interested in learning it, but in
retrospect it turned out to be a very good decision. From my perspective,
Python has almost all of the strengths of Perl, but few of its inherent
weaknesses (I feel that primarily, Python code often ends up being much more
readable than Perl code).

Around this same time, skyjammer.com and cedar-solutions.com were converted to
run Debian GNU/Linux (potato) ^[4] and I entered the Debian new maintainer
queue, so I also made it a goal to implement Debian packages along with a
Python source distribution for the new release.

Version 1.0 of Cedar Backup was released in June of 2002. We immediately began
using it to back up skyjammer.com and cedar-solutions.com, where it proved to
be much more stable than the original code.

In the meantime, I continued to improve as a Python programmer and also started
doing a significant amount of professional development in Java. It soon became
obvious that the internal structure of Cedar Backup 1.0, while much better than
kbackup, still left something to be desired. In November 2003, I began an
attempt at cleaning up the codebase. I converted all of the internal
documentation to use Epydoc, ^[5] and updated the code to use the
newly-released Python logging package ^[6] after having a good experience with
Java's log4j. However, I was still not satisfied with the code, which did not
lend itself to the automated regression testing I had used when working with
junit in my Java code.

So, rather than releasing the cleaned-up code, I instead began another
ground-up rewrite in May 2004. With this rewrite, I applied everything I had
learned from other Java and Python projects I had undertaken over the last few
years. I structured the code to take advantage of Python's unique ability to
blend procedural code with object-oriented code, and I made automated unit
testing a primary requirement. The result was the 2.0 release, which is
cleaner, more compact, better focused, and better documented than any release
before it. Utility code is less application-specific, and is now usable as a
general-purpose library. The 2.0 release also includes a complete regression
test suite of over 3000 tests, which will help to ensure that quality is
maintained as development continues into the future. ^[7]

The 3.0 release of Cedar Backup is a Python 3 conversion of the 2.0 release,
with minimal additional functionality. The conversion from Python 2 to Python 3
started in mid-2015, about 5 years before the anticipated deprecation of Python
2 in 2020. Most users should consider transitioning to the 3.0 release.


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^[1] See https://bitbucket.org/cedarsolutions/cedar-backup2/issues.

^[2] See Simon Tatham's excellent bug reporting tutorial: http://
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html .

^[3] See http://www.python.org/ .

^[4] Debian's stable releases are named after characters in the Toy Story
movie.

^[5] Epydoc is a Python code documentation tool. See http://
epydoc.sourceforge.net/.

^[6] See http://docs.python.org/lib/module-logging.html .

^[7] Tests are implemented using Python's unit test framework. See http://
docs.python.org/lib/module-unittest.html.

Chapter 2. Basic Concepts

Table of Contents

General Architecture
Data Recovery
Cedar Backup Pools
The Backup Process

    The Collect Action
    The Stage Action
    The Store Action
    The Purge Action
    The All Action
    The Validate Action
    The Initialize Action
    The Rebuild Action

Coordination between Master and Clients
Managed Backups
Media and Device Types
Incremental Backups
Extensions

General Architecture

Cedar Backup is architected as a Python package (library) and a single
executable (a Python script). The Python package provides both
application-specific code and general utilities that can be used by programs
other than Cedar Backup. It also includes modules that can be used by third
parties to extend Cedar Backup or provide related functionality.

The cback script is designed to run as root, since otherwise it's difficult to
back up system directories or write to the CD/DVD device. However, pains are
taken to use the backup user's effective user id (specified in configuration)
when appropriate. Note: this does not mean that cback runs setuid^[8] or setgid
. However, all files on disk will be owned by the backup user, and and all
rsh-based network connections will take place as the backup user.

The cback script is configured via command-line options and an XML
configuration file on disk. The configuration file is normally stored in /etc/
cback.conf, but this path can be overridden at runtime. See Chapter 5, 
Configuration for more information on how Cedar Backup is configured.

Warning

You should be aware that backups to CD/DVD media can probably be read by any
user which has permissions to mount the CD/DVD writer. If you intend to leave
the backup disc in the drive at all times, you may want to consider this when
setting up device permissions on your machine. See also the section called
?Encrypt Extension?.

Data Recovery

Cedar Backup does not include any facility to restore backups. Instead, it
assumes that the administrator (using the procedures and references in
Appendix C, Data Recovery) can handle the task of restoring their own system,
using the standard system tools at hand.

If I were to maintain recovery code in Cedar Backup, I would almost certainly
end up in one of two situations. Either Cedar Backup would only support simple
recovery tasks, and those via an interface a lot like that of the underlying
system tools; or Cedar Backup would have to include a hugely complicated
interface to support more specialized (and hence useful) recovery tasks like
restoring individual files as of a certain point in time. In either case, I
would end up trying to maintain critical functionality that would be rarely
used, and hence would also be rarely tested by end-users. I am uncomfortable
asking anyone to rely on functionality that falls into this category.

My primary goal is to keep the Cedar Backup codebase as simple and focused as
possible. I hope you can understand how the choice of providing documentation,
but not code, seems to strike the best balance between managing code complexity
and providing the functionality that end-users need.

Cedar Backup Pools

There are two kinds of machines in a Cedar Backup pool. One machine (the master
) has a CD or DVD writer on it and writes the backup to disc. The others (
clients) collect data to be written to disc by the master. Collectively, the
master and client machines in a pool are called peer machines.

Cedar Backup has been designed primarily for situations where there is a single
master and a set of other clients that the master interacts with. However, it
will just as easily work for a single machine (a backup pool of one) and in
fact more users seem to use it like this than any other way.

The Backup Process

The Cedar Backup backup process is structured in terms of a set of decoupled
actions which execute independently (based on a schedule in cron) rather than
through some highly coordinated flow of control.

This design decision has both positive and negative consequences. On the one
hand, the code is much simpler and can choose to simply abort or log an error
if its expectations are not met. On the other hand, the administrator must
coordinate the various actions during initial set-up. See the section called
?Coordination between Master and Clients? (later in this chapter) for more
information on this subject.

A standard backup run consists of four steps (actions), some of which execute
on the master machine, and some of which execute on one or more client
machines. These actions are: collect, stage, store and purge.

In general, more than one action may be specified on the command-line. If more
than one action is specified, then actions will be taken in a sensible order
(generally collect, stage, store, purge). A special all action is also allowed,
which implies all of the standard actions in the same sensible order.

The cback command also supports several actions that are not part of the
standard backup run and cannot be executed along with any other actions. These
actions are validate, initialize and rebuild. All of the various actions are
discussed further below.

See Chapter 5, Configuration for more information on how a backup run is
configured.

Flexibility

Cedar Backup was designed to be flexible. It allows you to decide for yourself
which backup steps you care about executing (and when you execute them), based
on your own situation and your own priorities.

As an example, I always back up every machine I own. I typically keep 7-10 days
of staging directories around, but switch CD/DVD media mostly every week. That
way, I can periodically take a disc off-site in case the machine gets stolen or
damaged.

If you're not worried about these risks, then there's no need to write to disc.
In fact, some users prefer to use their master machine as a simple ?
consolidation point?. They don't back up any data on the master, and don't
write to disc at all. They just use Cedar Backup to handle the mechanics of
moving backed-up data to a central location. This isn't quite what Cedar Backup
was written to do, but it is flexible enough to meet their needs.

The Collect Action

The collect action is the first action in a standard backup run. It executes on
both master and client nodes. Based on configuration, this action traverses the
peer's filesystem and gathers files to be backed up. Each configured high-level
directory is collected up into its own tar file in the collect directory. The
tarfiles can either be uncompressed (.tar) or compressed with either gzip
(.tar.gz) or bzip2 (.tar.bz2).

There are three supported collect modes: daily, weekly and incremental.
Directories configured for daily backups are backed up every day. Directories
configured for weekly backups are backed up on the first day of the week.
Directories configured for incremental backups are traversed every day, but
only the files which have changed (based on a saved-off SHA hash) are actually
backed up.

Collect configuration also allows for a variety of ways to filter files and
directories out of the backup. For instance, administrators can configure an
ignore indicator file ^[9] or specify absolute paths or filename patterns ^[10]
to be excluded. You can even configure a backup ?link farm? rather than
explicitly listing files and directories in configuration.

This action is optional on the master. You only need to configure and execute
the collect action on the master if you have data to back up on that machine.
If you plan to use the master only as a ?consolidation point? to collect data
from other machines, then there is no need to execute the collect action there.
If you run the collect action on the master, it behaves the same there as
anywhere else, and you have to stage the master's collected data just like any
other client (typically by configuring a local peer in the stage action).

The Stage Action

The stage action is the second action in a standard backup run. It executes on
the master peer node. The master works down the list of peers in its backup
pool and stages (copies) the collected backup files from each of them into a
daily staging directory by peer name.

For the purposes of this action, the master node can be configured to treat
itself as a client node. If you intend to back up data on the master, configure
the master as a local peer. Otherwise, just configure each of the clients as a
remote peer.

Local and remote client peers are treated differently. Local peer collect
directories are assumed to be accessible via normal copy commands (i.e. on a
mounted filesystem) while remote peer collect directories are accessed via an
RSH-compatible command such as ssh.

If a given peer is not ready to be staged, the stage process will log an error,
abort the backup for that peer, and then move on to its other peers. This way,
one broken peer cannot break a backup for other peers which are up and running.

Keep in mind that Cedar Backup is flexible about what actions must be executed
as part of a backup. If you would prefer, you can stop the backup process at
this step, and skip the store step. In this case, the staged directories will
represent your backup rather than a disc.

Note

Directories ?collected? by another process can be staged by Cedar Backup. If
the file cback.collect exists in a collect directory when the stage action is
taken, then that directory will be staged.

The Store Action

The store action is the third action in a standard backup run. It executes on
the master peer node. The master machine determines the location of the current
staging directory, and then writes the contents of that staging directory to
disc. After the contents of the directory have been written to disc, an
optional validation step ensures that the write was successful.

If the backup is running on the first day of the week, if the drive does not
support multisession discs, or if the --full option is passed to the cback
command, the disc will be rebuilt from scratch. Otherwise, a new ISO session
will be added to the disc each day the backup runs.

This action is entirely optional. If you would prefer to just stage backup data
from a set of peers to a master machine, and have the staged directories
represent your backup rather than a disc, this is fine.

Warning

The store action is not supported on the Mac OS X (darwin) platform. On that
platform, the ?automount? function of the Finder interferes significantly with
Cedar Backup's ability to mount and unmount media and write to the CD or DVD
hardware. The Cedar Backup writer and image functionality works on this
platform, but the effort required to fight the operating system about who owns
the media and the device makes it nearly impossible to execute the store action
successfully.

Current Staging Directory

The store action tries to be smart about finding the current staging directory.
It first checks the current day's staging directory. If that directory exists,
and it has not yet been written to disc (i.e. there is no store indicator),
then it will be used. Otherwise, the store action will look for an unused
staging directory for either the previous day or the next day, in that order. A
warning will be written to the log under these circumstances (controlled by the
<warn_midnite> configuration value).

This behavior varies slightly when the --full option is in effect. Under these
circumstances, any existing store indicator will be ignored. Also, the store
action will always attempt to use the current day's staging directory, ignoring
any staging directories for the previous day or the next day. This way, running
a full store action more than once concurrently will always produce the same
results. (You might imagine a use case where a person wants to make several
copies of the same full backup.)

The Purge Action

The purge action is the fourth and final action in a standard backup run. It
executes both on the master and client peer nodes. Configuration specifies how
long to retain files in certain directories, and older files and empty
directories are purged.

Typically, collect directories are purged daily, and stage directories are
purged weekly or slightly less often (if a disc gets corrupted, older backups
may still be available on the master). Some users also choose to purge the
configured working directory (which is used for temporary files) to eliminate
any leftover files which might have resulted from changes to configuration.

The All Action

The all action is a pseudo-action which causes all of the actions in a standard
backup run to be executed together in order. It cannot be combined with any
other actions on the command line.

Extensions cannot be executed as part of the all action. If you need to execute
an extended action, you must specify the other actions you want to run
individually on the command line. ^[11]

The all action does not have its own configuration. Instead, it relies on the
individual configuration sections for all of the other actions.

The Validate Action

The validate action is used to validate configuration on a particular peer
node, either master or client. It cannot be combined with any other actions on
the command line.

The validate action checks that the configuration file can be found, that the
configuration file is valid, and that certain portions of the configuration
file make sense (for instance, making sure that specified users exist,
directories are readable and writable as necessary, etc.).

The Initialize Action

The initialize action is used to initialize media for use with Cedar Backup.
This is an optional step. By default, Cedar Backup does not need to use
initialized media and will write to whatever media exists in the writer device.

However, if the ?check media? store configuration option is set to true, Cedar
Backup will check the media before writing to it and will error out if the
media has not been initialized.

Initializing the media consists of writing a mostly-empty image using a known
media label (the media label will begin with ?CEDAR BACKUP?).

Note that only rewritable media (CD-RW, DVD+RW) can be initialized. It doesn't
make any sense to initialize media that cannot be rewritten (CD-R, DVD+R),
since Cedar Backup would then not be able to use that media for a backup. You
can still configure Cedar Backup to check non-rewritable media; in this case,
the check will also pass if the media is apparently unused (i.e. has no media
label).

The Rebuild Action

The rebuild action is an exception-handling action that is executed independent
of a standard backup run. It cannot be combined with any other actions on the
command line.

The rebuild action attempts to rebuild ?this week's? disc from any remaining
unpurged staging directories. Typically, it is used to make a copy of a backup,
replace lost or damaged media, or to switch to new media mid-week for some
other reason.

To decide what data to write to disc again, the rebuild action looks back and
finds the first day of the current week. Then, it finds any remaining staging
directories between that date and the current date. If any staging directories
are found, they are all written to disc in one big ISO session.

The rebuild action does not have its own configuration. It relies on
configuration for other other actions, especially the store action.

Coordination between Master and Clients

Unless you are using Cedar Backup to manage a ?pool of one?, you will need to
set up some coordination between your clients and master to make everything
work properly. This coordination isn't difficult ? it mostly consists of making
sure that operations happen in the right order ? but some users are suprised
that it is required and want to know why Cedar Backup can't just ?take care of
it for me?.

Essentially, each client must finish collecting all of its data before the
master begins staging it, and the master must finish staging data from a client
before that client purges its collected data. Administrators may need to
experiment with the time between the collect and purge entries so that the
master has enough time to stage data before it is purged.

Managed Backups

Cedar Backup also supports an optional feature called the ?managed backup?.
This feature is intended for use with remote clients where cron is not
available.

When managed backups are enabled, managed clients must still be configured as
usual. However, rather than using a cron job on the client to execute the
collect and purge actions, the master executes these actions on the client via
a remote shell.

To make this happen, first set up one or more managed clients in Cedar Backup
configuration. Then, invoke Cedar Backup with the --managed command-line
option. Whenever Cedar Backup invokes an action locally, it will invoke the
same action on each of the managed clients.

Technically, this feature works for any client, not just clients that don't
have cron available. Used this way, it can simplify the setup process, because
cron only has to be configured on the master. For some users, that may be
motivation enough to use this feature all of the time.

However, please keep in mind that this feature depends on a stable network. If
your network connection drops, your backup will be interrupted and will not be
complete. It is even possible that some of the Cedar Backup metadata (like
incremental backup state) will be corrupted. The risk is not high, but it is
something you need to be aware of if you choose to use this optional feature.

Media and Device Types

Cedar Backup is focused around writing backups to CD or DVD media using a
standard SCSI or IDE writer. In Cedar Backup terms, the disc itself is referred
to as the media, and the CD/DVD drive is referred to as the device or sometimes
the backup device. ^[12]

When using a new enough backup device, a new ?multisession? ISO image ^[13] is
written to the media on the first day of the week, and then additional
multisession images are added to the media each day that Cedar Backup runs.
This way, the media is complete and usable at the end of every backup run, but
a single disc can be used all week long. If your backup device does not support
multisession images ? which is really unusual today ? then a new ISO image will
be written to the media each time Cedar Backup runs (and you should probably
confine yourself to the ?daily? backup mode to avoid losing data).

Cedar Backup currently supports four different kinds of CD media:

cdr-74

    74-minute non-rewritable CD media

cdrw-74

    74-minute rewritable CD media

cdr-80

    80-minute non-rewritable CD media

cdrw-80

    80-minute rewritable CD media

I have chosen to support just these four types of CD media because they seem to
be the most ?standard? of the various types commonly sold in the U.S. as of
this writing (early 2005). If you regularly use an unsupported media type and
would like Cedar Backup to support it, send me information about the capacity
of the media in megabytes (MB) and whether it is rewritable.

Cedar Backup also supports two kinds of DVD media:

dvd+r

    Single-layer non-rewritable DVD+R media

dvd+rw

    Single-layer rewritable DVD+RW media

The underlying growisofs utility does support other kinds of media (including
DVD-R, DVD-RW and BlueRay) which work somewhat differently than standard DVD+R
and DVD+RW media. I don't support these other kinds of media because I haven't
had any opportunity to work with them. The same goes for dual-layer media of
any type.

Incremental Backups

Cedar Backup supports three different kinds of backups for individual collect
directories. These are daily, weekly and incremental backups. Directories using
the daily mode are backed up every day. Directories using the weekly mode are
only backed up on the first day of the week, or when the --full option is used.
Directories using the incremental mode are always backed up on the first day of
the week (like a weekly backup), but after that only the files which have
changed are actually backed up on a daily basis.

In Cedar Backup, incremental backups are not based on date, but are instead
based on saved checksums, one for each backed-up file. When a full backup is
run, Cedar Backup gathers a checksum value ^[14] for each backed-up file. The
next time an incremental backup is run, Cedar Backup checks its list of file/
checksum pairs for each file that might be backed up. If the file's checksum
value does not match the saved value, or if the file does not appear in the
list of file/checksum pairs, then it will be backed up and a new checksum value
will be placed into the list. Otherwise, the file will be ignored and the
checksum value will be left unchanged.

Cedar Backup stores the file/checksum pairs in .sha files in its working
directory, one file per configured collect directory. The mappings in these
files are reset at the start of the week or when the --full option is used.
Because these files are used for an entire week, you should never purge the
working directory more frequently than once per week.

Extensions

Imagine that there is a third party developer who understands how to back up a
certain kind of database repository. This third party might want to integrate
his or her specialized backup into the Cedar Backup process, perhaps thinking
of the database backup as a sort of ?collect? step.

Prior to Cedar Backup version 2, any such integration would have been
completely independent of Cedar Backup itself. The ?external? backup
functionality would have had to maintain its own configuration and would not
have had access to any Cedar Backup configuration.

Starting with version 2, Cedar Backup allows extensions to the backup process.
An extension is an action that isn't part of the standard backup process (i.e.
not collect, stage, store or purge), but can be executed by Cedar Backup when
properly configured.

Extension authors implement an ?action process? function with a certain
interface, and are allowed to add their own sections to the Cedar Backup
configuration file, so that all backup configuration can be centralized. Then,
the action process function is associated with an action name which can be
executed from the cback command line like any other action.

Hopefully, as the Cedar Backup user community grows, users will contribute
their own extensions back to the community. Well-written general-purpose
extensions will be accepted into the official codebase.

Note

Users should see Chapter 5, Configuration for more information on how
extensions are configured, and Chapter 6, Official Extensions for details on
all of the officially-supported extensions.

Developers may be interested in Appendix A, Extension Architecture Interface.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

^[8] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid

^[9] Analagous to .cvsignore in CVS

^[10] In terms of Python regular expressions

^[11] Some users find this surprising, because extensions are configured with
sequence numbers. I did it this way because I felt that running extensions as
part of the all action would sometimes result in surprising behavior. I am not
planning to change the way this works.

^[12] My original backup device was an old Sony CRX140E 4X CD-RW drive. It has
since died, and I currently develop using a Lite-On 1673S DVD±RW drive.

^[13] An ISO image is the standard way of creating a filesystem to be copied to
a CD or DVD. It is essentially a ?filesystem-within-a-file? and many UNIX
operating systems can actually mount ISO image files just like hard drives,
floppy disks or actual CDs. See Wikipedia for more information: http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_image.

^[14] The checksum is actually an SHA cryptographic hash. See Wikipedia for
more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1.

Chapter 3. Installation

Table of Contents

Background
Installing on a Debian System
Installing from Source

    Installing Dependencies
    Installing the Source Package

Background

There are two different ways to install Cedar Backup. The easiest way is to
install the pre-built Debian packages. This method is painless and ensures that
all of the correct dependencies are available, etc.

If you are running a Linux distribution other than Debian or you are running
some other platform like FreeBSD or Mac OS X, then you must use the Python
source distribution to install Cedar Backup. When using this method, you need
to manage all of the dependencies yourself.

Non-Linux Platforms

Cedar Backup has been developed on a Debian GNU/Linux system and is primarily
supported on Debian and other Linux systems. However, since it is written in
portable Python 2, it should run without problems on just about any UNIX-like
operating system. In particular, full Cedar Backup functionality is known to
work on Debian and SuSE Linux systems, and client functionality is also known
to work on FreeBSD and Mac OS X systems.

To run a Cedar Backup client, you really just need a working Python 2
installation. To run a Cedar Backup master, you will also need a set of other
executables, most of which are related to building and writing CD/DVD images. A
full list of dependencies is provided further on in this chapter.

Installing on a Debian System

The easiest way to install Cedar Backup onto a Debian system is by using a tool
such as apt-get or aptitude.

If you are running a Debian release which contains Cedar Backup, you can use
your normal Debian mirror as an APT data source. (The Debian ?etch? release is
the first release to contain Cedar Backup 2.) Otherwise, you need to install
from the Cedar Solutions APT data source. ^[15] To do this, add the Cedar
Solutions APT data source to your /etc/apt/sources.list file.

After you have configured the proper APT data source, install Cedar Backup
using this set of commands:

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install cedar-backup2 cedar-backup2-doc


Several of the Cedar Backup dependencies are listed as ?recommended? rather
than required. If you are installing Cedar Backup on a master machine, you must
install some or all of the recommended dependencies, depending on which actions
you intend to execute. The stage action normally requires ssh, and the store
action requires eject and either cdrecord/mkisofs or dvd+rw-tools. Clients must
also install some sort of ssh server if a remote master will collect backups
from them.

If you would prefer, you can also download the .deb files and install them by
hand with a tool such as dpkg. You can find these files files in the Cedar
Solutions APT source.

In either case, once the package has been installed, you can proceed to
configuration as described in Chapter 5, Configuration.

Note

The Debian package-management tools must generally be run as root. It is safe
to install Cedar Backup to a non-standard location and run it as a non-root
user. However, to do this, you must install the source distribution instead of
the Debian package.

Installing from Source

On platforms other than Debian, Cedar Backup is installed from a Python source
distribution. ^[16] You will have to manage dependencies on your own.

Tip

Many UNIX-like distributions provide an automatic or semi-automatic way to
install packages like the ones Cedar Backup requires (think RPMs for Mandrake
or RedHat, Gentoo's Portage system, the Fink project for Mac OS X, or the BSD
ports system). If you are not sure how to install these packages on your
system, you might want to check out Appendix B, Dependencies. This appendix
provides links to ?upstream? source packages, plus as much information as I
have been able to gather about packages for non-Debian platforms.

Installing Dependencies

Cedar Backup requires a number of external packages in order to function
properly. Before installing Cedar Backup, you must make sure that these
dependencies are met.

Cedar Backup is written in Python 2 and requires version 2.7 or greater of the
language. Python 2.7 was originally released on 4 Jul 2010, and is the last
supported release of Python 2. As of this writing, all current Linux and BSD
distributions include it. You must install Python 2 on every peer node in a
pool (master or client).

Additionally, remote client peer nodes must be running an RSH-compatible
server, such as the ssh server, and master nodes must have an RSH-compatible
client installed if they need to connect to remote peer machines.

Master machines also require several other system utilities, most having to do
with writing and validating CD/DVD media. On master machines, you must make
sure that these utilities are available if you want to to run the store action:

  * mkisofs

  * eject

  * mount

  * unmount

  * volname

Then, you need this utility if you are writing CD media:

  * cdrecord

or these utilities if you are writing DVD media:

  * growisofs

All of these utilities are common and are easy to find for almost any UNIX-like
operating system.

Installing the Source Package

Python source packages are fairly easy to install. They are distributed as
.tar.gz files which contain Python source code, a manifest and an installation
script called setup.py.

Once you have downloaded the source package from the Cedar Solutions website, ^
[15] untar it:

$ zcat CedarBackup2-2.0.0.tar.gz | tar xvf -


This will create a directory called (in this case) CedarBackup2-2.0.0. The
version number in the directory will always match the version number in the
filename.

If you have root access and want to install the package to the ?standard?
Python location on your system, then you can install the package in two simple
steps:

$ cd CedarBackup2-2.0.0
$ python setup.py install


Make sure that you are using Python 2.7 or better to execute setup.py.

You may also wish to run the unit tests before actually installing anything.
Run them like so:

python util/test.py


If any unit test reports a failure on your system, please email me the output
from the unit test, so I can fix the problem. ^[17] This is particularly
important for non-Linux platforms where I do not have a test system available
to me.

Some users might want to choose a different install location or change other
install parameters. To get more information about how setup.py works, use the
--help option:

$ python setup.py --help
$ python setup.py install --help


In any case, once the package has been installed, you can proceed to
configuration as described in Chapter 5, Configuration.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

^[15] See http://cedar-solutions.com/debian.html

^[16] See http://docs.python.org/lib/module-distutils.html .

^[17] <support@cedar-solutions.com>

Chapter 4. Command Line Tools

Table of Contents

Overview
The cback command

    Introduction
    Syntax
    Switches
    Actions

The cback-amazons3-sync command

    Introduction
    Syntax
    Switches

The cback-span command

    Introduction
    Syntax
    Switches
    Using cback-span
    Sample run

Overview

Cedar Backup comes with three command-line programs: cback, cback-amazons3-sync
, and cback-span.

The cback command is the primary command line interface and the only Cedar
Backup program that most users will ever need.

The cback-amazons3-sync tool is used for synchronizing entire directories of
files up to an Amazon S3 cloud storage bucket, outside of the normal Cedar
Backup process.

Users who have a lot of data to back up ? more than will fit on a single CD or
DVD ? can use the interactive cback-span tool to split their data between
multiple discs.

The cback command

Introduction

Cedar Backup's primary command-line interface is the cback command. It controls
the entire backup process.

Syntax

The cback command has the following syntax:

 Usage: cback [switches] action(s)

 The following switches are accepted:

   -h, --help         Display this usage/help listing
   -V, --version      Display version information
   -b, --verbose      Print verbose output as well as logging to disk
   -q, --quiet        Run quietly (display no output to the screen)
   -c, --config       Path to config file (default: /etc/cback.conf)
   -f, --full         Perform a full backup, regardless of configuration
   -M, --managed      Include managed clients when executing actions
   -N, --managed-only Include ONLY managed clients when executing actions
   -l, --logfile      Path to logfile (default: /var/log/cback.log)
   -o, --owner        Logfile ownership, user:group (default: root:adm)
   -m, --mode         Octal logfile permissions mode (default: 640)
   -O, --output       Record some sub-command (i.e. cdrecord) output to the log
   -d, --debug        Write debugging information to the log (implies --output)
   -s, --stack        Dump a Python stack trace instead of swallowing exceptions
   -D, --diagnostics  Print runtime diagnostics to the screen and exit

 The following actions may be specified:

   all                Take all normal actions (collect, stage, store, purge)
   collect            Take the collect action
   stage              Take the stage action
   store              Take the store action
   purge              Take the purge action
   rebuild            Rebuild "this week's" disc if possible
   validate           Validate configuration only
   initialize         Initialize media for use with Cedar Backup

 You may also specify extended actions that have been defined in
 configuration.

 You must specify at least one action to take.  More than one of
 the "collect", "stage", "store" or "purge" actions and/or
 extended actions may be specified in any arbitrary order; they
 will be executed in a sensible order.  The "all", "rebuild",
 "validate", and "initialize" actions may not be combined with
 other actions.


Note that the all action only executes the standard four actions. It never
executes any of the configured extensions. ^[18]

Switches

-h, --help

    Display usage/help listing.

-V, --version

    Display version information.

-b, --verbose

    Print verbose output to the screen as well writing to the logfile. When
    this option is enabled, most information that would normally be written to
    the logfile will also be written to the screen.

-q, --quiet

    Run quietly (display no output to the screen).

-c, --config

    Specify the path to an alternate configuration file. The default
    configuration file is /etc/cback.conf.

-f, --full

    Perform a full backup, regardless of configuration. For the collect action,
    this means that any existing information related to incremental backups
    will be ignored and rewritten; for the store action, this means that a new
    disc will be started.

-M, --managed

    Include managed clients when executing actions. If the action being
    executed is listed as a managed action for a managed client, execute the
    action on that client after executing the action locally.

-N, --managed-only

    Include only managed clients when executing actions. If the action being
    executed is listed as a managed action for a managed client, execute the
    action on that client ? but do not execute the action locally.

-l, --logfile

    Specify the path to an alternate logfile. The default logfile file is /var/
    log/cback.log.

-o, --owner

    Specify the ownership of the logfile, in the form user:group. The default
    ownership is root:adm, to match the Debian standard for most logfiles. This
    value will only be used when creating a new logfile. If the logfile already
    exists when the cback command is executed, it will retain its existing
    ownership and mode. Only user and group names may be used, not numeric uid
    and gid values.

-m, --mode

    Specify the permissions for the logfile, using the numeric mode as in chmod
    (1). The default mode is 0640 (-rw-r-----). This value will only be used
    when creating a new logfile. If the logfile already exists when the cback
    command is executed, it will retain its existing ownership and mode.

-O, --output

    Record some sub-command output to the logfile. When this option is enabled,
    all output from system commands will be logged. This might be useful for
    debugging or just for reference.

-d, --debug

    Write debugging information to the logfile. This option produces a high
    volume of output, and would generally only be needed when debugging a
    problem. This option implies the --output option, as well.

-s, --stack

    Dump a Python stack trace instead of swallowing exceptions. This forces
    Cedar Backup to dump the entire Python stack trace associated with an
    error, rather than just propagating last message it received back up to the
    user interface. Under some circumstances, this is useful information to
    include along with a bug report.

-D, --diagnostics

    Display runtime diagnostic information and then exit. This diagnostic
    information is often useful when filing a bug report.

Actions

You can find more information about the various actions in the section called
?The Backup Process? (in Chapter 2, Basic Concepts). In general, you may
specify any combination of the collect, stage, store or purge actions, and the
specified actions will be executed in a sensible order. Or, you can specify one
of the all, rebuild, validate, or initialize actions (but these actions may not
be combined with other actions).

If you have configured any Cedar Backup extensions, then the actions associated
with those extensions may also be specified on the command line. If you specify
any other actions along with an extended action, the actions will be executed
in a sensible order per configuration. The all action never executes extended
actions, however.

The cback-amazons3-sync command

Introduction

The cback-amazons3-sync tool is used for synchronizing entire directories of
files up to an Amazon S3 cloud storage bucket, outside of the normal Cedar
Backup process.

This might be a good option for some types of data, as long as you understand
the limitations around retrieving previous versions of objects that get
modified or deleted as part of a sync. S3 does support versioning, but it won't
be quite as easy to get at those previous versions as with an explicit
incremental backup like cback provides. Cedar Backup does not provide any
tooling that would help you retrieve previous versions.

The underlying functionality relies on the AWS CLI toolset. Before you use this
extension, you need to set up your Amazon S3 account and configure AWS CLI as
detailed in Amazons's setup guide. The aws command will be executed as the same
user that is executing the cback-amazons3-sync command, so make sure you
configure it as the proper user. (This is different than the amazons3
extension, which is designed to execute as root and switches over to the
configured backup user to execute AWS CLI commands.)

Syntax

The cback-amazons3-sync command has the following syntax:

 Usage: cback-amazons3-sync [switches] sourceDir s3bucketUrl

 Cedar Backup Amazon S3 sync tool.

 This Cedar Backup utility synchronizes a local directory to an Amazon S3
 bucket.  After the sync is complete, a validation step is taken.  An
 error is reported if the contents of the bucket do not match the
 source directory, or if the indicated size for any file differs.
 This tool is a wrapper over the AWS CLI command-line tool.

 The following arguments are required:

   sourceDir            The local source directory on disk (must exist)
   s3BucketUrl          The URL to the target Amazon S3 bucket

 The following switches are accepted:

   -h, --help           Display this usage/help listing
   -V, --version        Display version information
   -b, --verbose        Print verbose output as well as logging to disk
   -q, --quiet          Run quietly (display no output to the screen)
   -l, --logfile        Path to logfile (default: /var/log/cback.log)
   -o, --owner          Logfile ownership, user:group (default: root:adm)
   -m, --mode           Octal logfile permissions mode (default: 640)
   -O, --output         Record some sub-command (i.e. aws) output to the log
   -d, --debug          Write debugging information to the log (implies --output)
   -s, --stack          Dump Python stack trace instead of swallowing exceptions
   -D, --diagnostics    Print runtime diagnostics to the screen and exit
   -v, --verifyOnly     Only verify the S3 bucket contents, do not make changes
   -w, --ignoreWarnings Ignore warnings about problematic filename encodings

 Typical usage would be something like:

   cback-amazons3-sync /home/myuser s3://example.com-backup/myuser

 This will sync the contents of /home/myuser into the indicated bucket.


Switches

-h, --help

    Display usage/help listing.

-V, --version

    Display version information.

-b, --verbose

    Print verbose output to the screen as well writing to the logfile. When
    this option is enabled, most information that would normally be written to
    the logfile will also be written to the screen.

-q, --quiet

    Run quietly (display no output to the screen).

-l, --logfile

    Specify the path to an alternate logfile. The default logfile file is /var/
    log/cback.log.

-o, --owner

    Specify the ownership of the logfile, in the form user:group. The default
    ownership is root:adm, to match the Debian standard for most logfiles. This
    value will only be used when creating a new logfile. If the logfile already
    exists when the cback-amazons3-sync command is executed, it will retain its
    existing ownership and mode. Only user and group names may be used, not
    numeric uid and gid values.

-m, --mode

    Specify the permissions for the logfile, using the numeric mode as in chmod
    (1). The default mode is 0640 (-rw-r-----). This value will only be used
    when creating a new logfile. If the logfile already exists when the 
    cback-amazons3-sync command is executed, it will retain its existing
    ownership and mode.

-O, --output

    Record some sub-command output to the logfile. When this option is enabled,
    all output from system commands will be logged. This might be useful for
    debugging or just for reference.

-d, --debug

    Write debugging information to the logfile. This option produces a high
    volume of output, and would generally only be needed when debugging a
    problem. This option implies the --output option, as well.

-s, --stack

    Dump a Python stack trace instead of swallowing exceptions. This forces
    Cedar Backup to dump the entire Python stack trace associated with an
    error, rather than just propagating last message it received back up to the
    user interface. Under some circumstances, this is useful information to
    include along with a bug report.

-D, --diagnostics

    Display runtime diagnostic information and then exit. This diagnostic
    information is often useful when filing a bug report.

-v, --verifyOnly

    Only verify the S3 bucket contents against the directory on disk. Do not
    make any changes to the S3 bucket or transfer any files. This is intended
    as a quick check to see whether the sync is up-to-date.

    Although no files are transferred, the tool will still execute the source
    filename encoding check, discussed below along with --ignoreWarnings.

-w, --ignoreWarnings

    The AWS CLI S3 sync process is very picky about filename encoding. Files
    that the Linux filesystem handles with no problems can cause problems in S3
    if the filename cannot be encoded properly in your configured locale. As of
    this writing, filenames like this will cause the sync process to abort
    without transferring all files as expected.

    To avoid confusion, the cback-amazons3-sync tries to guess which files in
    the source directory will cause problems, and refuses to execute the AWS
    CLI S3 sync if any problematic files exist. If you'd rather proceed anyway,
    use --ignoreWarnings.

    If problematic files are found, then you have basically two options: either
    correct your locale (i.e. if you have set LANG=C) or rename the file so it
    can be encoded properly in your locale. The error messages will tell you
    the expected encoding (from your locale) and the actual detected encoding
    for the filename.

The cback-span command

Introduction

Cedar Backup was designed ? and is still primarily focused ? around weekly
backups to a single CD or DVD. Most users who back up more data than fits on a
single disc seem to stop their backup process at the stage step, using Cedar
Backup as an easy way to collect data.

However, some users have expressed a need to write these large kinds of backups
to disc ? if not every day, then at least occassionally. The cback-span tool
was written to meet those needs. If you have staged more data than fits on a
single CD or DVD, you can use cback-span to split that data between multiple
discs.

cback-span is not a general-purpose disc-splitting tool. It is a specialized
program that requires Cedar Backup configuration to run. All it can do is read
Cedar Backup configuration, find any staging directories that have not yet been
written to disc, and split the files in those directories between discs.

cback-span accepts many of the same command-line options as cback, but must be
run interactively. It cannot be run from cron. This is intentional. It is
intended to be a useful tool, not a new part of the backup process (that is the
purpose of an extension).

In order to use cback-span, you must configure your backup such that the
largest individual backup file can fit on a single disc. The command will not
split a single file onto more than one disc. All it can do is split large
directories onto multiple discs. Files in those directories will be arbitrarily
split up so that space is utilized most efficiently.

Syntax

The cback-span command has the following syntax:

 Usage: cback-span [switches]

 Cedar Backup 'span' tool.

 This Cedar Backup utility spans staged data between multiple discs.
 It is a utility, not an extension, and requires user interaction.

 The following switches are accepted, mostly to set up underlying
 Cedar Backup functionality:

   -h, --help     Display this usage/help listing
   -V, --version  Display version information
   -b, --verbose  Print verbose output as well as logging to disk
   -c, --config   Path to config file (default: /etc/cback.conf)
   -l, --logfile  Path to logfile (default: /var/log/cback.log)
   -o, --owner    Logfile ownership, user:group (default: root:adm)
   -m, --mode     Octal logfile permissions mode (default: 640)
   -O, --output   Record some sub-command (i.e. cdrecord) output to the log
   -d, --debug    Write debugging information to the log (implies --output)
   -s, --stack    Dump a Python stack trace instead of swallowing exceptions


Switches

-h, --help

    Display usage/help listing.

-V, --version

    Display version information.

-b, --verbose

    Print verbose output to the screen as well writing to the logfile. When
    this option is enabled, most information that would normally be written to
    the logfile will also be written to the screen.

-c, --config

    Specify the path to an alternate configuration file. The default
    configuration file is /etc/cback.conf.

-l, --logfile

    Specify the path to an alternate logfile. The default logfile file is /var/
    log/cback.log.

-o, --owner

    Specify the ownership of the logfile, in the form user:group. The default
    ownership is root:adm, to match the Debian standard for most logfiles. This
    value will only be used when creating a new logfile. If the logfile already
    exists when the cback command is executed, it will retain its existing
    ownership and mode. Only user and group names may be used, not numeric uid
    and gid values.

-m, --mode

    Specify the permissions for the logfile, using the numeric mode as in chmod
    (1). The default mode is 0640 (-rw-r-----). This value will only be used
    when creating a new logfile. If the logfile already exists when the cback
    command is executed, it will retain its existing ownership and mode.

-O, --output

    Record some sub-command output to the logfile. When this option is enabled,
    all output from system commands will be logged. This might be useful for
    debugging or just for reference. Cedar Backup uses system commands mostly
    for dealing with the CD/DVD recorder and its media.

-d, --debug

    Write debugging information to the logfile. This option produces a high
    volume of output, and would generally only be needed when debugging a
    problem. This option implies the --output option, as well.

-s, --stack

    Dump a Python stack trace instead of swallowing exceptions. This forces
    Cedar Backup to dump the entire Python stack trace associated with an
    error, rather than just propagating last message it received back up to the
    user interface. Under some circumstances, this is useful information to
    include along with a bug report.

Using cback-span

As discussed above, the cback-span is an interactive command. It cannot be run
from cron.

You can typically use the default answer for most questions. The only two
questions that you may not want the default answer for are the fit algorithm
and the cushion percentage.

The cushion percentage is used by cback-span to determine what capacity to
shoot for when splitting up your staging directories. A 650 MB disc does not
fit fully 650 MB of data. It's usually more like 627 MB of data. The cushion
percentage tells cback-span how much overhead to reserve for the filesystem.
The default of 4% is usually OK, but if you have problems you may need to
increase it slightly.

The fit algorithm tells cback-span how it should determine which items should
be placed on each disc. If you don't like the result from one algorithm, you
can reject that solution and choose a different algorithm.

The four available fit algorithms are:

worst

    The worst-fit algorithm.

    The worst-fit algorithm proceeds through a sorted list of items (sorted
    from smallest to largest) until running out of items or meeting capacity
    exactly. If capacity is exceeded, the item that caused capacity to be
    exceeded is thrown away and the next one is tried. The algorithm
    effectively includes the maximum number of items possible in its search for
    optimal capacity utilization. It tends to be somewhat slower than either
    the best-fit or alternate-fit algorithm, probably because on average it has
    to look at more items before completing.

best

    The best-fit algorithm.

    The best-fit algorithm proceeds through a sorted list of items (sorted from
    largest to smallest) until running out of items or meeting capacity
    exactly. If capacity is exceeded, the item that caused capacity to be
    exceeded is thrown away and the next one is tried. The algorithm
    effectively includes the minimum number of items possible in its search for
    optimal capacity utilization. For large lists of mixed-size items, it's not
    unusual to see the algorithm achieve 100% capacity utilization by including
    fewer than 1% of the items. Probably because it often has to look at fewer
    of the items before completing, it tends to be a little faster than the
    worst-fit or alternate-fit algorithms.

first

    The first-fit algorithm.

    The first-fit algorithm proceeds through an unsorted list of items until
    running out of items or meeting capacity exactly. If capacity is exceeded,
    the item that caused capacity to be exceeded is thrown away and the next
    one is tried. This algorithm generally performs more poorly than the other
    algorithms both in terms of capacity utilization and item utilization, but
    can be as much as an order of magnitude faster on large lists of items
    because it doesn't require any sorting.

alternate

    A hybrid algorithm that I call alternate-fit.

    This algorithm tries to balance small and large items to achieve better
    end-of-disk performance. Instead of just working one direction through a
    list, it alternately works from the start and end of a sorted list (sorted
    from smallest to largest), throwing away any item which causes capacity to
    be exceeded. The algorithm tends to be slower than the best-fit and
    first-fit algorithms, and slightly faster than the worst-fit algorithm,
    probably because of the number of items it considers on average before
    completing. It often achieves slightly better capacity utilization than the
    worst-fit algorithm, while including slightly fewer items.

Sample run

Below is a log showing a sample cback-span run.

================================================
           Cedar Backup 'span' tool
================================================

This the Cedar Backup span tool.  It is used to split up staging
data when that staging data does not fit onto a single disc.

This utility operates using Cedar Backup configuration.  Configuration
specifies which staging directory to look at and which writer device
and media type to use.

Continue? [Y/n]:
===

Cedar Backup store configuration looks like this:

   Source Directory...: /tmp/staging
   Media Type.........: cdrw-74
   Device Type........: cdwriter
   Device Path........: /dev/cdrom
   Device SCSI ID.....: None
   Drive Speed........: None
   Check Data Flag....: True
   No Eject Flag......: False

Is this OK? [Y/n]:
===

Please wait, indexing the source directory (this may take a while)...
===

The following daily staging directories have not yet been written to disc:

   /tmp/staging/2007/02/07
   /tmp/staging/2007/02/08
   /tmp/staging/2007/02/09
   /tmp/staging/2007/02/10
   /tmp/staging/2007/02/11
   /tmp/staging/2007/02/12
   /tmp/staging/2007/02/13
   /tmp/staging/2007/02/14

The total size of the data in these directories is 1.00 GB.

Continue? [Y/n]:
===

Based on configuration, the capacity of your media is 650.00 MB.

Since estimates are not perfect and there is some uncertainly in
media capacity calculations, it is good to have a "cushion",
a percentage of capacity to set aside.  The cushion reduces the
capacity of your media, so a 1.5% cushion leaves 98.5% remaining.

What cushion percentage? [4.00]:
===

The real capacity, taking into account the 4.00% cushion, is 627.25 MB.
It will take at least 2 disc(s) to store your 1.00 GB of data.

Continue? [Y/n]:
===

Which algorithm do you want to use to span your data across
multiple discs?

The following algorithms are available:

   first....: The "first-fit" algorithm
   best.....: The "best-fit" algorithm
   worst....: The "worst-fit" algorithm
   alternate: The "alternate-fit" algorithm

If you don't like the results you will have a chance to try a
different one later.

Which algorithm? [worst]:
===

Please wait, generating file lists (this may take a while)...
===

Using the "worst-fit" algorithm, Cedar Backup can split your data
into 2 discs.

Disc 1: 246 files, 615.97 MB, 98.20% utilization
Disc 2: 8 files, 412.96 MB, 65.84% utilization

Accept this solution? [Y/n]: n
===

Which algorithm do you want to use to span your data across
multiple discs?

The following algorithms are available:

   first....: The "first-fit" algorithm
   best.....: The "best-fit" algorithm
   worst....: The "worst-fit" algorithm
   alternate: The "alternate-fit" algorithm

If you don't like the results you will have a chance to try a
different one later.

Which algorithm? [worst]: alternate
===

Please wait, generating file lists (this may take a while)...
===

Using the "alternate-fit" algorithm, Cedar Backup can split your data
into 2 discs.

Disc 1: 73 files, 627.25 MB, 100.00% utilization
Disc 2: 181 files, 401.68 MB, 64.04% utilization

Accept this solution? [Y/n]: y
===

Please place the first disc in your backup device.
Press return when ready.
===

Initializing image...
Writing image to disc...



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

^[18] Some users find this surprising, because extensions are configured with
sequence numbers. I did it this way because I felt that running extensions as
part of the all action would sometimes result in ?surprising? behavior. Better
to be definitive than confusing.

Chapter 5. Configuration

Table of Contents

Overview
Configuration File Format

    Sample Configuration File
    Reference Configuration
    Options Configuration
    Peers Configuration
    Collect Configuration
    Stage Configuration
    Store Configuration
    Purge Configuration
    Extensions Configuration

Setting up a Pool of One

    Step 1: Decide when you will run your backup.
    Step 2: Make sure email works.
    Step 3: Configure your writer device.
    Step 4: Configure your backup user.
    Step 5: Create your backup tree.
    Step 6: Create the Cedar Backup configuration file.
    Step 7: Validate the Cedar Backup configuration file.
    Step 8: Test your backup.
    Step 9: Modify the backup cron jobs.

Setting up a Client Peer Node

    Step 1: Decide when you will run your backup.
    Step 2: Make sure email works.
    Step 3: Configure the master in your backup pool.
    Step 4: Configure your backup user.
    Step 5: Create your backup tree.
    Step 6: Create the Cedar Backup configuration file.
    Step 7: Validate the Cedar Backup configuration file.
    Step 8: Test your backup.
    Step 9: Modify the backup cron jobs.

Setting up a Master Peer Node

    Step 1: Decide when you will run your backup.
    Step 2: Make sure email works.
    Step 3: Configure your writer device.
    Step 4: Configure your backup user.
    Step 5: Create your backup tree.
    Step 6: Create the Cedar Backup configuration file.
    Step 7: Validate the Cedar Backup configuration file.
    Step 8: Test connectivity to client machines.
    Step 9: Test your backup.
    Step 10: Modify the backup cron jobs.

Configuring your Writer Device

    Device Types
    Devices identified by by device name
    Devices identified by SCSI id
    Linux Notes
    Finding your Linux CD Writer
    Mac OS X Notes

Optimized Blanking Stategy

Overview

Configuring Cedar Backup is unfortunately somewhat complicated. The good news
is that once you get through the initial configuration process, you'll hardly
ever have to change anything. Even better, the most typical changes (i.e.
adding and removing directories from a backup) are easy.

First, familiarize yourself with the concepts in Chapter 2, Basic Concepts. In
particular, be sure that you understand the differences between a master and a
client. (If you only have one machine, then your machine will act as both a
master and a client, and we'll refer to your setup as a pool of one.) Then,
install Cedar Backup per the instructions in Chapter 3, Installation.

Once everything has been installed, you are ready to begin configuring Cedar
Backup. Look over the section called ?The cback command? (in Chapter 4, Command
Line Tools) to become familiar with the command line interface. Then, look over
the section called ?Configuration File Format? (below) and create a
configuration file for each peer in your backup pool. To start with, create a
very simple configuration file, then expand it later. Decide now whether you
will store the configuration file in the standard place (/etc/cback.conf) or in
some other location.

After you have all of the configuration files in place, configure each of your
machines, following the instructions in the appropriate section below (for
master, client or pool of one). Since the master and client(s) must communicate
over the network, you won't be able to fully configure the master without
configuring each client and vice-versa. The instructions are clear on what
needs to be done.

Which Platform?

Cedar Backup has been designed for use on all UNIX-like systems. However, since
it was developed on a Debian GNU/Linux system, and because I am a Debian
developer, the packaging is prettier and the setup is somewhat simpler on a
Debian system than on a system where you install from source.

The configuration instructions below have been generalized so they should work
well regardless of what platform you are running (i.e. RedHat, Gentoo, FreeBSD,
etc.). If instructions vary for a particular platform, you will find a note
related to that platform.

I am always open to adding more platform-specific hints and notes, so write me
if you find problems with these instructions.

Configuration File Format

Cedar Backup is configured through an XML ^[19] configuration file, usually
called /etc/cback.conf. The configuration file contains the following sections:
reference, options, collect, stage, store, purge and extensions.

All configuration files must contain the two general configuration sections,
the reference section and the options section. Besides that, administrators
need only configure actions they intend to use. For instance, on a client
machine, administrators will generally only configure the collect and purge
sections, while on a master machine they will have to configure all four
action-related sections. ^[20] The extensions section is always optional and
can be omitted unless extensions are in use.

Note

Even though the Mac OS X (darwin) filesystem is not case-sensitive, Cedar
Backup configuration is generally case-sensitive on that platform, just like on
all other platforms. For instance, even though the files ?Ken? and ?ken? might
be the same on the Mac OS X filesystem, an exclusion in Cedar Backup
configuration for ?ken? will only match the file if it is actually on the
filesystem with a lower-case ?k? as its first letter. This won't surprise the
typical UNIX user, but might surprise someone who's gotten into the ?Mac
Mindset?.

Sample Configuration File

Both the Python source distribution and the Debian package come with a sample
configuration file. The Debian package includes its sample in /usr/share/doc/
cedar-backup2/examples/cback.conf.sample.

This is a sample configuration file similar to the one provided in the source
package. Documentation below provides more information about each of the
individual configuration sections.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<cb_config>
   <reference>
      <author>Kenneth J. Pronovici</author>
      <revision>1.3</revision>
      <description>Sample</description>
   </reference>
   <options>
      <starting_day>tuesday</starting_day>
      <working_dir>/opt/backup/tmp</working_dir>
      <backup_user>backup</backup_user>
      <backup_group>group</backup_group>
      <rcp_command>/usr/bin/scp -B</rcp_command>
   </options>
   <peers>
      <peer>
         <name>debian</name>
         <type>local</type>
         <collect_dir>/opt/backup/collect</collect_dir>
      </peer>
   </peers>
   <collect>
      <collect_dir>/opt/backup/collect</collect_dir>
      <collect_mode>daily</collect_mode>
      <archive_mode>targz</archive_mode>
      <ignore_file>.cbignore</ignore_file>
      <dir>
         <abs_path>/etc</abs_path>
         <collect_mode>incr</collect_mode>
      </dir>
      <file>
         <abs_path>/home/root/.profile</abs_path>
         <collect_mode>weekly</collect_mode>
      </file>
   </collect>
   <stage>
      <staging_dir>/opt/backup/staging</staging_dir>
   </stage>
   <store>
      <source_dir>/opt/backup/staging</source_dir>
      <media_type>cdrw-74</media_type>
      <device_type>cdwriter</device_type>
      <target_device>/dev/cdrw</target_device>
      <target_scsi_id>0,0,0</target_scsi_id>
      <drive_speed>4</drive_speed>
      <check_data>Y</check_data>
      <check_media>Y</check_media>
      <warn_midnite>Y</warn_midnite>
   </store>
   <purge>
      <dir>
         <abs_path>/opt/backup/stage</abs_path>
         <retain_days>7</retain_days>
      </dir>
      <dir>
         <abs_path>/opt/backup/collect</abs_path>
         <retain_days>0</retain_days>
      </dir>
   </purge>
</cb_config>


Reference Configuration

The reference configuration section contains free-text elements that exist only
for reference.. The section itself is required, but the individual elements may
be left blank if desired.

This is an example reference configuration section:

<reference>
   <author>Kenneth J. Pronovici</author>
   <revision>Revision 1.3</revision>
   <description>Sample</description>
   <generator>Yet to be Written Config Tool (tm)</description>
</reference>


The following elements are part of the reference configuration section:

author

    Author of the configuration file.

    Restrictions: None

revision

    Revision of the configuration file.

    Restrictions: None

description

    Description of the configuration file.

    Restrictions: None

generator

    Tool that generated the configuration file, if any.

    Restrictions: None

Options Configuration

The options configuration section contains configuration options that are not
specific to any one action.

This is an example options configuration section:

<options>
   <starting_day>tuesday</starting_day>
   <working_dir>/opt/backup/tmp</working_dir>
   <backup_user>backup</backup_user>
   <backup_group>backup</backup_group>
   <rcp_command>/usr/bin/scp -B</rcp_command>
   <rsh_command>/usr/bin/ssh</rsh_command>
   <cback_command>/usr/bin/cback</cback_command>
   <managed_actions>collect, purge</managed_actions>
   <override>
      <command>cdrecord</command>
      <abs_path>/opt/local/bin/cdrecord</abs_path>
   </override>
   <override>
      <command>mkisofs</command>
      <abs_path>/opt/local/bin/mkisofs</abs_path>
   </override>
   <pre_action_hook>
      <action>collect</action>
      <command>echo "I AM A PRE-ACTION HOOK RELATED TO COLLECT"</command>
   </pre_action_hook>
   <post_action_hook>
      <action>collect</action>
      <command>echo "I AM A POST-ACTION HOOK RELATED TO COLLECT"</command>
   </post_action_hook>
</options>


The following elements are part of the options configuration section:

starting_day

    Day that starts the week.

    Cedar Backup is built around the idea of weekly backups. The starting day
    of week is the day that media will be rebuilt from scratch and that
    incremental backup information will be cleared.

    Restrictions: Must be a day of the week in English, i.e. monday, tuesday,
    etc. The validation is case-sensitive.

working_dir

    Working (temporary) directory to use for backups.

    This directory is used for writing temporary files, such as tar file or ISO
    filesystem images as they are being built. It is also used to store
    day-to-day information about incremental backups.

    The working directory should contain enough free space to hold temporary
    tar files (on a client) or to build an ISO filesystem image (on a master).

    Restrictions: Must be an absolute path

backup_user

    Effective user that backups should run as.

    This user must exist on the machine which is being configured and should
    not be root (although that restriction is not enforced).

    This value is also used as the default remote backup user for remote peers.

    Restrictions: Must be non-empty

backup_group

    Effective group that backups should run as.

    This group must exist on the machine which is being configured, and should
    not be root or some other ?powerful? group (although that restriction is
    not enforced).

    Restrictions: Must be non-empty

rcp_command

    Default rcp-compatible copy command for staging.

    The rcp command should be the exact command used for remote copies,
    including any required options. If you are using scp, you should pass it
    the -B option, so scp will not ask for any user input (which could hang the
    backup). A common example is something like /usr/bin/scp -B.

    This value is used as the default value for all remote peers. Technically,
    this value is not needed by clients, but we require it for all config files
    anyway.

    Restrictions: Must be non-empty

rsh_command

    Default rsh-compatible command to use for remote shells.

    The rsh command should be the exact command used for remote shells,
    including any required options.

    This value is used as the default value for all managed clients. It is
    optional, because it is only used when executing actions on managed
    clients. However, each managed client must either be able to read the value
    from options configuration or must set the value explicitly.

    Restrictions: Must be non-empty

cback_command

    Default cback-compatible command to use on managed remote clients.

    The cback command should be the exact command used for for executing cback
    on a remote managed client, including any required command-line options. Do
    not list any actions in the command line, and do not include the --full
    command-line option.

    This value is used as the default value for all managed clients. It is
    optional, because it is only used when executing actions on managed
    clients. However, each managed client must either be able to read the value
    from options configuration or must set the value explicitly.

    Note: if this command-line is complicated, it is often better to create a
    simple shell script on the remote host to encapsulate all of the options.
    Then, just reference the shell script in configuration.

    Restrictions: Must be non-empty

managed_actions

    Default set of actions that are managed on remote clients.

    This is a comma-separated list of actions that the master will manage on
    behalf of remote clients. Typically, it would include only collect-like
    actions and purge.

    This value is used as the default value for all managed clients. It is
    optional, because it is only used when executing actions on managed
    clients. However, each managed client must either be able to read the value
    from options configuration or must set the value explicitly.

    Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

override

    Command to override with a customized path.

    This is a subsection which contains a command to override with a customized
    path. This functionality would be used if root's $PATH does not include a
    particular required command, or if there is a need to use a version of a
    command that is different than the one listed on the $PATH. Most users will
    only use this section when directed to, in order to fix a problem.

    This section is optional, and can be repeated as many times as necessary.

    This subsection must contain the following two fields:

    command

        Name of the command to be overridden, i.e. ?cdrecord?.

        Restrictions: Must be a non-empty string.

    abs_path

        The absolute path where the overridden command can be found.

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

pre_action_hook

    Hook configuring a command to be executed before an action.

    This is a subsection which configures a command to be executed immediately
    before a named action. It provides a way for administrators to associate
    their own custom functionality with standard Cedar Backup actions or with
    arbitrary extensions.

    This section is optional, and can be repeated as many times as necessary.

    This subsection must contain the following two fields:

    action

        Name of the Cedar Backup action that the hook is associated with. The
        action can be a standard backup action (collect, stage, etc.) or can be
        an extension action. No validation is done to ensure that the
        configured action actually exists.

        Restrictions: Must be a non-empty string.

    command

        Name of the command to be executed. This item can either specify the
        path to a shell script of some sort (the recommended approach) or can
        include a complete shell command.

        Note: if you choose to provide a complete shell command rather than the
        path to a script, you need to be aware of some limitations of Cedar
        Backup's command-line parser. You cannot use a subshell (via the
        `command` or $(command) syntaxes) or any shell variable in your command
        line. Additionally, the command-line parser only recognizes the
        double-quote character (") to delimit groupings or strings on the
        command-line. The bottom line is, you are probably best off writing a
        shell script of some sort for anything more sophisticated than very
        simple shell commands.

        Restrictions: Must be a non-empty string.

post_action_hook

    Hook configuring a command to be executed after an action.

    This is a subsection which configures a command to be executed immediately
    after a named action. It provides a way for administrators to associate
    their own custom functionality with standard Cedar Backup actions or with
    arbitrary extensions.

    This section is optional, and can be repeated as many times as necessary.

    This subsection must contain the following two fields:

    action

        Name of the Cedar Backup action that the hook is associated with. The
        action can be a standard backup action (collect, stage, etc.) or can be
        an extension action. No validation is done to ensure that the
        configured action actually exists.

        Restrictions: Must be a non-empty string.

    command

        Name of the command to be executed. This item can either specify the
        path to a shell script of some sort (the recommended approach) or can
        include a complete shell command.

        Note: if you choose to provide a complete shell command rather than the
        path to a script, you need to be aware of some limitations of Cedar
        Backup's command-line parser. You cannot use a subshell (via the
        `command` or $(command) syntaxes) or any shell variable in your command
        line. Additionally, the command-line parser only recognizes the
        double-quote character (") to delimit groupings or strings on the
        command-line. The bottom line is, you are probably best off writing a
        shell script of some sort for anything more sophisticated than very
        simple shell commands.

        Restrictions: Must be a non-empty string.

Peers Configuration

The peers configuration section contains a list of the peers managed by a
master. This section is only required on a master.

This is an example peers configuration section:

<peers>
   <peer>
      <name>machine1</name>
      <type>local</type>
      <collect_dir>/opt/backup/collect</collect_dir>
   </peer>
   <peer>
      <name>machine2</name>
      <type>remote</type>
      <backup_user>backup</backup_user>
      <collect_dir>/opt/backup/collect</collect_dir>
      <ignore_failures>all</ignore_failures>
   </peer>
   <peer>
      <name>machine3</name>
      <type>remote</type>
      <managed>Y</managed>
      <backup_user>backup</backup_user>
      <collect_dir>/opt/backup/collect</collect_dir>
      <rcp_command>/usr/bin/scp</rcp_command>
      <rsh_command>/usr/bin/ssh</rsh_command>
      <cback_command>/usr/bin/cback</cback_command>
      <managed_actions>collect, purge</managed_actions>
   </peer>
</peers>


The following elements are part of the peers configuration section:

peer (local version)

    Local client peer in a backup pool.

    This is a subsection which contains information about a specific local
    client peer managed by a master.

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    remote or local peer must be configured.

    The local peer subsection must contain the following fields:

    name

        Name of the peer, typically a valid hostname.

        For local peers, this value is only used for reference. However, it is
        good practice to list the peer's hostname here, for consistency with
        remote peers.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty, and unique among all peers.

    type

        Type of this peer.

        This value identifies the type of the peer. For a local peer, it must
        always be local.

        Restrictions: Must be local.

    collect_dir

        Collect directory to stage from for this peer.

        The master will copy all files in this directory into the appropriate
        staging directory. Since this is a local peer, the directory is assumed
        to be reachable via normal filesystem operations (i.e. cp).

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

    ignore_failures

        Ignore failure mode for this peer

        The ignore failure mode indicates whether ?not ready to be staged?
        errors should be ignored for this peer. This option is intended to be
        used for peers that are up only intermittently, to cut down on the
        number of error emails received by the Cedar Backup administrator.

        The "none" mode means that all errors will be reported. This is the
        default behavior. The "all" mode means to ignore all failures. The
        "weekly" mode means to ignore failures for a start-of-week or full
        backup. The "daily" mode means to ignore failures for any backup that
        is not either a full backup or a start-of-week backup.

        Restrictions: If set, must be one of "none", "all", "daily", or
        "weekly".

peer (remote version)

    Remote client peer in a backup pool.

    This is a subsection which contains information about a specific remote
    client peer managed by a master. A remote peer is one which can be reached
    via an rsh-based network call.

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    remote or local peer must be configured.

    The remote peer subsection must contain the following fields:

    name

        Hostname of the peer.

        For remote peers, this must be a valid DNS hostname or IP address which
        can be resolved during an rsh-based network call.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty, and unique among all peers.

    type

        Type of this peer.

        This value identifies the type of the peer. For a remote peer, it must
        always be remote.

        Restrictions: Must be remote.

    managed

        Indicates whether this peer is managed.

        A managed peer (or managed client) is a peer for which the master
        manages all of the backup activites via a remote shell.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, then N will be assumed.

        Restrictions: Must be a boolean (Y or N).

    collect_dir

        Collect directory to stage from for this peer.

        The master will copy all files in this directory into the appropriate
        staging directory. Since this is a remote peer, the directory is
        assumed to be reachable via rsh-based network operations (i.e. scp or
        the configured rcp command).

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

    ignore_failures

        Ignore failure mode for this peer

        The ignore failure mode indicates whether ?not ready to be staged?
        errors should be ignored for this peer. This option is intended to be
        used for peers that are up only intermittently, to cut down on the
        number of error emails received by the Cedar Backup administrator.

        The "none" mode means that all errors will be reported. This is the
        default behavior. The "all" mode means to ignore all failures. The
        "weekly" mode means to ignore failures for a start-of-week or full
        backup. The "daily" mode means to ignore failures for any backup that
        is not either a full backup or a start-of-week backup.

        Restrictions: If set, must be one of "none", "all", "daily", or
        "weekly".

    backup_user

        Name of backup user on the remote peer.

        This username will be used when copying files from the remote peer via
        an rsh-based network connection.

        This field is optional. if it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default backup user from the options section.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

    rcp_command

        The rcp-compatible copy command for this peer.

        The rcp command should be the exact command used for remote copies,
        including any required options. If you are using scp, you should pass
        it the -B option, so scp will not ask for any user input (which could
        hang the backup). A common example is something like /usr/bin/scp -B.

        This field is optional. if it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default rcp command from the options section.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

    rsh_command

        The rsh-compatible command for this peer.

        The rsh command should be the exact command used for remote shells,
        including any required options.

        This value only applies if the peer is managed.

        This field is optional. if it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default rsh command from the options section.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty

    cback_command

        The cback-compatible command for this peer.

        The cback command should be the exact command used for for executing
        cback on the peer as part of a managed backup. This value must include
        any required command-line options. Do not list any actions in the
        command line, and do not include the --full command-line option.

        This value only applies if the peer is managed.

        This field is optional. if it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default cback command from the options section.

        Note: if this command-line is complicated, it is often better to create
        a simple shell script on the remote host to encapsulate all of the
        options. Then, just reference the shell script in configuration.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty

    managed_actions

        Set of actions that are managed for this peer.

        This is a comma-separated list of actions that the master will manage
        on behalf this peer. Typically, it would include only collect-like
        actions and purge.

        This value only applies if the peer is managed.

        This field is optional. if it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default list of managed actions from the options section.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

Collect Configuration

The collect configuration section contains configuration options related the
the collect action. This section contains a variable number of elements,
including an optional exclusion section and a repeating subsection used to
specify which directories and/or files to collect. You can also configure an
ignore indicator file, which lets users mark their own directories as not
backed up.

Using a Link Farm

Sometimes, it's not very convenient to list directories one by one in the Cedar
Backup configuration file. For instance, when backing up your home directory,
you often exclude as many directories as you include. The ignore file mechanism
can be of some help, but it still isn't very convenient if there are a lot of
directories to ignore (or if new directories pop up all of the time).

In this situation, one option is to use a link farm rather than listing all of
the directories in configuration. A link farm is a directory that contains
nothing but a set of soft links to other files and directories. Normally, Cedar
Backup does not follow soft links, but you can override this behavior for
individual directories using the link_depth and dereference options (see
below).

When using a link farm, you still have to deal with each backed-up directory
individually, but you don't have to modify configuration. Some users find that
this works better for them.

In order to actually execute the collect action, you must have configured at
least one collect directory or one collect file. However, if you are only
including collect configuration for use by an extension, then it's OK to leave
out these sections. The validation will take place only when the collect action
is executed.

This is an example collect configuration section:

<collect>
   <collect_dir>/opt/backup/collect</collect_dir>
   <collect_mode>daily</collect_mode>
   <archive_mode>targz</archive_mode>
   <ignore_file>.cbignore</ignore_file>
   <exclude>
      <abs_path>/etc</abs_path>
      <pattern>.*\.conf</pattern>
   </exclude>
   <file>
      <abs_path>/home/root/.profile</abs_path>
   </file>
   <dir>
      <abs_path>/etc</abs_path>
   </dir>
   <dir>
      <abs_path>/var/log</abs_path>
      <collect_mode>incr</collect_mode>
   </dir>
   <dir>
      <abs_path>/opt</abs_path>
      <collect_mode>weekly</collect_mode>
      <exclude>
         <abs_path>/opt/large</abs_path>
         <rel_path>backup</rel_path>
         <pattern>.*tmp</pattern>
      </exclude>
   </dir>
</collect>


The following elements are part of the collect configuration section:

collect_dir

    Directory to collect files into.

    On a client, this is the directory which tarfiles for individual collect
    directories are written into. The master then stages files from this
    directory into its own staging directory.

    This field is always required. It must contain enough free space to collect
    all of the backed-up files on the machine in a compressed form.

    Restrictions: Must be an absolute path

collect_mode

    Default collect mode.

    The collect mode describes how frequently a directory is backed up. See the
    section called ?The Collect Action? (in Chapter 2, Basic Concepts) for more
    information.

    This value is the collect mode that will be used by default during the
    collect process. Individual collect directories (below) may override this
    value. If all individual directories provide their own value, then this
    default value may be omitted from configuration.

    Note: if your backup device does not suppport multisession discs, then you
    should probably use the daily collect mode to avoid losing data.

    Restrictions: Must be one of daily, weekly or incr.

archive_mode

    Default archive mode for collect files.

    The archive mode maps to the way that a backup file is stored. A value tar
    means just a tarfile (file.tar); a value targz means a gzipped tarfile
    (file.tar.gz); and a value tarbz2 means a bzipped tarfile (file.tar.bz2)

    This value is the archive mode that will be used by default during the
    collect process. Individual collect directories (below) may override this
    value. If all individual directories provide their own value, then this
    default value may be omitted from configuration.

    Restrictions: Must be one of tar, targz or tarbz2.

ignore_file

    Default ignore file name.

    The ignore file is an indicator file. If it exists in a given directory,
    then that directory will be recursively excluded from the backup as if it
    were explicitly excluded in configuration.

    The ignore file provides a way for individual users (who might not have
    access to Cedar Backup configuration) to control which of their own
    directories get backed up. For instance, users with a ~/tmp directory might
    not want it backed up. If they create an ignore file in their directory
    (e.g. ~/tmp/.cbignore), then Cedar Backup will ignore it.

    This value is the ignore file name that will be used by default during the
    collect process. Individual collect directories (below) may override this
    value. If all individual directories provide their own value, then this
    default value may be omitted from configuration.

    Restrictions: Must be non-empty

recursion_level

    Recursion level to use when collecting directories.

    This is an integer value that Cedar Backup will consider when generating
    archive files for a configured collect directory.

    Normally, Cedar Backup generates one archive file per collect directory.
    So, if you collect /etc you get etc.tar.gz. Most of the time, this is what
    you want. However, you may sometimes wish to generate multiple archive
    files for a single collect directory.

    The most obvious example is for /home. By default, Cedar Backup will
    generate home.tar.gz. If instead, you want one archive file per home
    directory you can set a recursion level of 1. Cedar Backup will generate
    home-user1.tar.gz, home-user2.tar.gz, etc.

    Higher recursion levels (2, 3, etc.) are legal, and it doesn't matter if
    the configured recursion level is deeper than the directory tree that is
    being collected. You can use a negative recursion level (like -1) to
    specify an infinite level of recursion. This will exhaust the tree in the
    same way as if the recursion level is set too high.

    This field is optional. if it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
    default recursion level of zero.

    Restrictions: Must be an integer.

exclude

    List of paths or patterns to exclude from the backup.

    This is a subsection which contains a set of absolute paths and patterns to
    be excluded across all configured directories. For a given directory, the
    set of absolute paths and patterns to exclude is built from this list and
    any list that exists on the directory itself. Directories cannot override
    or remove entries that are in this list, however.

    This section is optional, and if it exists can also be empty.

    The exclude subsection can contain one or more of each of the following
    fields:

    abs_path

        An absolute path to be recursively excluded from the backup.

        If a directory is excluded, then all of its children are also
        recursively excluded. For instance, a value /var/log/apache would
        exclude any files within /var/log/apache as well as files within other
        directories under /var/log/apache.

        This field can be repeated as many times as is necessary.

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

    pattern

        A pattern to be recursively excluded from the backup.

        The pattern must be a Python regular expression. ^[21] It is assumed to
        be bounded at front and back by the beginning and end of the string
        (i.e. it is treated as if it begins with ^ and ends with $).

        If the pattern causes a directory to be excluded, then all of the
        children of that directory are also recursively excluded. For instance,
        a value .*apache.* might match the /var/log/apache directory. This
        would exclude any files within /var/log/apache as well as files within
        other directories under /var/log/apache.

        This field can be repeated as many times as is necessary.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty

file

    A file to be collected.

    This is a subsection which contains information about a specific file to be
    collected (backed up).

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    collect directory or collect file must be configured when the collect
    action is executed.

    The collect file subsection contains the following fields:

    abs_path

        Absolute path of the file to collect.

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

    collect_mode

        Collect mode for this file

        The collect mode describes how frequently a file is backed up. See the
        section called ?The Collect Action? (in Chapter 2, Basic Concepts) for
        more information.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default collect mode.

        Note: if your backup device does not suppport multisession discs, then
        you should probably confine yourself to the daily collect mode, to
        avoid losing data.

        Restrictions: Must be one of daily, weekly or incr.

    archive_mode

        Archive mode for this file.

        The archive mode maps to the way that a backup file is stored. A value
        tar means just a tarfile (file.tar); a value targz means a gzipped
        tarfile (file.tar.gz); and a value tarbz2 means a bzipped tarfile
        (file.tar.bz2)

        This field is optional. if it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default archive mode.

        Restrictions: Must be one of tar, targz or tarbz2.

dir

    A directory to be collected.

    This is a subsection which contains information about a specific directory
    to be collected (backed up).

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    collect directory or collect file must be configured when the collect
    action is executed.

    The collect directory subsection contains the following fields:

    abs_path

        Absolute path of the directory to collect.

        The path may be either a directory, a soft link to a directory, or a
        hard link to a directory. All three are treated the same at this level.

        The contents of the directory will be recursively collected. The backup
        will contain all of the files in the directory, as well as the contents
        of all of the subdirectories within the directory, etc.

        Soft links within the directory are treated as files, i.e. they are
        copied verbatim (as a link) and their contents are not backed up.

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

    collect_mode

        Collect mode for this directory

        The collect mode describes how frequently a directory is backed up. See
        the section called ?The Collect Action? (in Chapter 2, Basic Concepts)
        for more information.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default collect mode.

        Note: if your backup device does not suppport multisession discs, then
        you should probably confine yourself to the daily collect mode, to
        avoid losing data.

        Restrictions: Must be one of daily, weekly or incr.

    archive_mode

        Archive mode for this directory.

        The archive mode maps to the way that a backup file is stored. A value
        tar means just a tarfile (file.tar); a value targz means a gzipped
        tarfile (file.tar.gz); and a value tarbz2 means a bzipped tarfile
        (file.tar.bz2)

        This field is optional. if it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default archive mode.

        Restrictions: Must be one of tar, targz or tarbz2.

    ignore_file

        Ignore file name for this directory.

        The ignore file is an indicator file. If it exists in a given
        directory, then that directory will be recursively excluded from the
        backup as if it were explicitly excluded in configuration.

        The ignore file provides a way for individual users (who might not have
        access to Cedar Backup configuration) to control which of their own
        directories get backed up. For instance, users with a ~/tmp directory
        might not want it backed up. If they create an ignore file in their
        directory (e.g. ~/tmp/.cbignore), then Cedar Backup will ignore it.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default ignore file name.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty

    link_depth

        Link depth value to use for this directory.

        The link depth is maximum depth of the tree at which soft links should
        be followed. So, a depth of 0 does not follow any soft links within the
        collect directory, a depth of 1 follows only links immediately within
        the collect directory, a depth of 2 follows the links at the next level
        down, etc.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will assume a
        value of zero, meaning that soft links within the collect directory
        will never be followed.

        Restrictions: If set, must be an integer ? 0.

    dereference

        Whether to dereference soft links.

        If this flag is set, links that are being followed will be dereferenced
        before being added to the backup. The link will be added (as a link),
        and then the directory or file that the link points at will be added as
        well.

        This value only applies to a directory where soft links are being
        followed (per the link_depth configuration option). It never applies to
        a configured collect directory itself, only to other directories within
        the collect directory.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will assume
        that links should never be dereferenced.

        Restrictions: Must be a boolean (Y or N).

    exclude

        List of paths or patterns to exclude from the backup.

        This is a subsection which contains a set of paths and patterns to be
        excluded within this collect directory. This list is combined with the
        program-wide list to build a complete list for the directory.

        This section is entirely optional, and if it exists can also be empty.

        The exclude subsection can contain one or more of each of the following
        fields:

        abs_path

            An absolute path to be recursively excluded from the backup.

            If a directory is excluded, then all of its children are also
            recursively excluded. For instance, a value /var/log/apache would
            exclude any files within /var/log/apache as well as files within
            other directories under /var/log/apache.

            This field can be repeated as many times as is necessary.

            Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

        rel_path

            A relative path to be recursively excluded from the backup.

            The path is assumed to be relative to the collect directory itself.
            For instance, if the configured directory is /opt/web a configured
            relative path of something/else would exclude the path /opt/web/
            something/else.

            If a directory is excluded, then all of its children are also
            recursively excluded. For instance, a value something/else would
            exclude any files within something/else as well as files within
            other directories under something/else.

            This field can be repeated as many times as is necessary.

            Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

        pattern

            A pattern to be excluded from the backup.

            The pattern must be a Python regular expression. ^[21] It is
            assumed to be bounded at front and back by the beginning and end of
            the string (i.e. it is treated as if it begins with ^ and ends with
            $).

            If the pattern causes a directory to be excluded, then all of the
            children of that directory are also recursively excluded. For
            instance, a value .*apache.* might match the /var/log/apache
            directory. This would exclude any files within /var/log/apache as
            well as files within other directories under /var/log/apache.

            This field can be repeated as many times as is necessary.

            Restrictions: Must be non-empty

Stage Configuration

The stage configuration section contains configuration options related the the
stage action. The section indicates where date from peers can be staged to.

This section can also (optionally) override the list of peers so that not all
peers are staged. If you provide any peers in this section, then the list of
peers here completely replaces the list of peers in the peers configuration
section for the purposes of staging.

This is an example stage configuration section for the simple case where the
list of peers is taken from peers configuration:

<stage>
   <staging_dir>/opt/backup/stage</staging_dir>
</stage>


This is an example stage configuration section that overrides the default list
of peers:

<stage>
   <staging_dir>/opt/backup/stage</staging_dir>
   <peer>
      <name>machine1</name>
      <type>local</type>
      <collect_dir>/opt/backup/collect</collect_dir>
   </peer>
   <peer>
      <name>machine2</name>
      <type>remote</type>
      <backup_user>backup</backup_user>
      <collect_dir>/opt/backup/collect</collect_dir>
   </peer>
</stage>


The following elements are part of the stage configuration section:

staging_dir

    Directory to stage files into.

    This is the directory into which the master stages collected data from each
    of the clients. Within the staging directory, data is staged into
    date-based directories by peer name. For instance, peer ?daystrom? backed
    up on 19 Feb 2005 would be staged into something like 2005/02/19/daystrom
    relative to the staging directory itself.

    This field is always required. The directory must contain enough free space
    to stage all of the files collected from all of the various machines in a
    backup pool. Many administrators set up purging to keep staging directories
    around for a week or more, which requires even more space.

    Restrictions: Must be an absolute path

peer (local version)

    Local client peer in a backup pool.

    This is a subsection which contains information about a specific local
    client peer to be staged (backed up). A local peer is one whose collect
    directory can be reached without requiring any rsh-based network calls. It
    is possible that a remote peer might be staged as a local peer if its
    collect directory is mounted to the master via NFS, AFS or some other
    method.

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    remote or local peer must be configured.

    Remember, if you provide any local or remote peer in staging configuration,
    the global peer configuration is completely replaced by the staging peer
    configuration.

    The local peer subsection must contain the following fields:

    name

        Name of the peer, typically a valid hostname.

        For local peers, this value is only used for reference. However, it is
        good practice to list the peer's hostname here, for consistency with
        remote peers.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty, and unique among all peers.

    type

        Type of this peer.

        This value identifies the type of the peer. For a local peer, it must
        always be local.

        Restrictions: Must be local.

    collect_dir

        Collect directory to stage from for this peer.

        The master will copy all files in this directory into the appropriate
        staging directory. Since this is a local peer, the directory is assumed
        to be reachable via normal filesystem operations (i.e. cp).

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

peer (remote version)

    Remote client peer in a backup pool.

    This is a subsection which contains information about a specific remote
    client peer to be staged (backed up). A remote peer is one whose collect
    directory can only be reached via an rsh-based network call.

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    remote or local peer must be configured.

    Remember, if you provide any local or remote peer in staging configuration,
    the global peer configuration is completely replaced by the staging peer
    configuration.

    The remote peer subsection must contain the following fields:

    name

        Hostname of the peer.

        For remote peers, this must be a valid DNS hostname or IP address which
        can be resolved during an rsh-based network call.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty, and unique among all peers.

    type

        Type of this peer.

        This value identifies the type of the peer. For a remote peer, it must
        always be remote.

        Restrictions: Must be remote.

    collect_dir

        Collect directory to stage from for this peer.

        The master will copy all files in this directory into the appropriate
        staging directory. Since this is a remote peer, the directory is
        assumed to be reachable via rsh-based network operations (i.e. scp or
        the configured rcp command).

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

    backup_user

        Name of backup user on the remote peer.

        This username will be used when copying files from the remote peer via
        an rsh-based network connection.

        This field is optional. if it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default backup user from the options section.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

    rcp_command

        The rcp-compatible copy command for this peer.

        The rcp command should be the exact command used for remote copies,
        including any required options. If you are using scp, you should pass
        it the -B option, so scp will not ask for any user input (which could
        hang the backup). A common example is something like /usr/bin/scp -B.

        This field is optional. if it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default rcp command from the options section.

        Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

Store Configuration

The store configuration section contains configuration options related the the
store action. This section contains several optional fields. Most fields
control the way media is written using the writer device.

This is an example store configuration section:

<store>
   <source_dir>/opt/backup/stage</source_dir>
   <media_type>cdrw-74</media_type>
   <device_type>cdwriter</device_type>
   <target_device>/dev/cdrw</target_device>
   <target_scsi_id>0,0,0</target_scsi_id>
   <drive_speed>4</drive_speed>
   <check_data>Y</check_data>
   <check_media>Y</check_media>
   <warn_midnite>Y</warn_midnite>
   <no_eject>N</no_eject>
   <refresh_media_delay>15</refresh_media_delay>
   <eject_delay>2</eject_delay>
   <blank_behavior>
      <mode>weekly</mode>
      <factor>1.3</factor>
   </blank_behavior>
</store>


The following elements are part of the store configuration section:

source_dir

    Directory whose contents should be written to media.

    This directory must be a Cedar Backup staging directory, as configured in
    the staging configuration section. Only certain data from that directory
    (typically, data from the current day) will be written to disc.

    Restrictions: Must be an absolute path

device_type

    Type of the device used to write the media.

    This field controls which type of writer device will be used by Cedar
    Backup. Currently, Cedar Backup supports CD writers (cdwriter) and DVD
    writers (dvdwriter).

    This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the cdwriter device type is
    assumed.

    Restrictions: If set, must be either cdwriter or dvdwriter.

media_type

    Type of the media in the device.

    Unless you want to throw away a backup disc every week, you are probably
    best off using rewritable media.

    You must choose a media type that is appropriate for the device type you
    chose above. For more information on media types, see the section called
    ?Media and Device Types? (in Chapter 2, Basic Concepts).

    Restrictions: Must be one of cdr-74, cdrw-74, cdr-80 or cdrw-80 if device
    type is cdwriter; or one of dvd+r or dvd+rw if device type is dvdwriter.

target_device

    Filesystem device name for writer device.

    This value is required for both CD writers and DVD writers.

    This is the UNIX device name for the writer drive, for instance /dev/scd0
    or a symlink like /dev/cdrw.

    In some cases, this device name is used to directly write to media. This is
    true all of the time for DVD writers, and is true for CD writers when a
    SCSI id (see below) has not been specified.

    Besides this, the device name is also needed in order to do several
    pre-write checks (such as whether the device might already be mounted) as
    well as the post-write consistency check, if enabled.

    Note: some users have reported intermittent problems when using a symlink
    as the target device on Linux, especially with DVD media. If you experience
    problems, try using the real device name rather than the symlink.

    Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

target_scsi_id

    SCSI id for the writer device.

    This value is optional for CD writers and is ignored for DVD writers.

    If you have configured your CD writer hardware to work through the normal
    filesystem device path, then you can leave this parameter unset. Cedar
    Backup will just use the target device (above) when talking to cdrecord.

    Otherwise, if you have SCSI CD writer hardware or you have configured your
    non-SCSI hardware to operate like a SCSI device, then you need to provide
    Cedar Backup with a SCSI id it can use when talking with cdrecord.

    For the purposes of Cedar Backup, a valid SCSI identifier must either be in
    the standard SCSI identifier form scsibus,target,lun or in the
    specialized-method form <method>:scsibus,target,lun.

    An example of a standard SCSI identifier is 1,6,2. Today, the two most
    common examples of the specialized-method form are ATA:scsibus,target,lun
    and ATAPI:scsibus,target,lun, but you may occassionally see other values
    (like OLDATAPI in some forks of cdrecord).

    See the section called ?Configuring your Writer Device? for more
    information on writer devices and how they are configured.

    Restrictions: If set, must be a valid SCSI identifier.

drive_speed

    Speed of the drive, i.e. 2 for a 2x device.

    This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the underlying device-related
    functionality will use the default drive speed.

    For DVD writers, it is best to leave this value unset, so growisofs can
    pick an appropriate speed. For CD writers, since media can be
    speed-sensitive, it is probably best to set a sensible value based on your
    specific writer and media.

    Restrictions: If set, must be an integer ? 1.

check_data

    Whether the media should be validated.

    This field indicates whether a resulting image on the media should be
    validated after the write completes, by running a consistency check against
    it. If this check is enabled, the contents of the staging directory are
    directly compared to the media, and an error is reported if there is a
    mismatch.

    Practice shows that some drives can encounter an error when writing a
    multisession disc, but not report any problems. This consistency check
    allows us to catch the problem. By default, the consistency check is
    disabled, but most users should choose to enable it unless they have a good
    reason not to.

    This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, then N will be assumed.

    Restrictions: Must be a boolean (Y or N).

check_media

    Whether the media should be checked before writing to it.

    By default, Cedar Backup does not check its media before writing to it. It
    will write to any media in the backup device. If you set this flag to Y,
    Cedar Backup will make sure that the media has been initialized before
    writing to it. (Rewritable media is initialized using the initialize
    action.)

    If the configured media is not rewritable (like CD-R), then this behavior
    is modified slightly. For this kind of media, the check passes either if
    the media has been initialized or if the media appears unused.

    This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, then N will be assumed.

    Restrictions: Must be a boolean (Y or N).

warn_midnite

    Whether to generate warnings for crossing midnite.

    This field indicates whether warnings should be generated if the store
    operation has to cross a midnite boundary in order to find data to write to
    disc. For instance, a warning would be generated if valid store data was
    only found in the day before or day after the current day.

    Configuration for some users is such that the store operation will always
    cross a midnite boundary, so they will not care about this warning. Other
    users will expect to never cross a boundary, and want to be notified that
    something ?strange? might have happened.

    This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, then N will be assumed.

    Restrictions: Must be a boolean (Y or N).

no_eject

    Indicates that the writer device should not be ejected.

    Under some circumstances, Cedar Backup ejects (opens and closes) the writer
    device. This is done because some writer devices need to re-load the media
    before noticing a media state change (like a new session).

    For most writer devices this is safe, because they have a tray that can be
    opened and closed. If your writer device does not have a tray and Cedar
    Backup does not properly detect this, then set this flag. Cedar Backup will
    not ever issue an eject command to your writer.

    Note: this could cause problems with your backup. For instance, with many
    writers, the check data step may fail if the media is not reloaded first.
    If this happens to you, you may need to get a different writer device.

    This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, then N will be assumed.

    Restrictions: Must be a boolean (Y or N).

refresh_media_delay

    Number of seconds to delay after refreshing media

    This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, no delay will occur.

    Some devices seem to take a little while to stablize after refreshing the
    media (i.e. closing and opening the tray). During this period, operations
    on the media may fail. If your device behaves like this, you can try
    setting a delay of 10-15 seconds.

    Restrictions: If set, must be an integer ? 1.

eject_delay

    Number of seconds to delay after ejecting the tray

    This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, no delay will occur.

    If your system seems to have problems opening and closing the tray, one
    possibility is that the open/close sequence is happening too quickly ?
    either the tray isn't fully open when Cedar Backup tries to close it, or it
    doesn't report being open. To work around that problem, set an eject delay
    of a few seconds.

    Restrictions: If set, must be an integer ? 1.

blank_behavior

    Optimized blanking strategy.

    For more information about Cedar Backup's optimized blanking strategy, see
    the section called ?Optimized Blanking Stategy?.

    This entire configuration section is optional. However, if you choose to
    provide it, you must configure both a blanking mode and a blanking factor.

    blank_mode

        Blanking mode.

        Restrictions:Must be one of "daily" or "weekly".

    blank_factor

        Blanking factor.

        Restrictions:Must be a floating point number ? 0.

Purge Configuration

The purge configuration section contains configuration options related the the
purge action. This section contains a set of directories to be purged, along
with information about the schedule at which they should be purged.

Typically, Cedar Backup should be configured to purge collect directories daily
(retain days of 0).

If you are tight on space, staging directories can also be purged daily.
However, if you have space to spare, you should consider purging about once per
week. That way, if your backup media is damaged, you will be able to recreate
the week's backup using the rebuild action.

You should also purge the working directory periodically, once every few weeks
or once per month. This way, if any unneeded files are left around, perhaps
because a backup was interrupted or because configuration changed, they will
eventually be removed. The working directory should not be purged any more
frequently than once per week, otherwise you will risk destroying data used for
incremental backups.

This is an example purge configuration section:

<purge>
   <dir>
      <abs_path>/opt/backup/stage</abs_path>
      <retain_days>7</retain_days>
   </dir>
   <dir>
      <abs_path>/opt/backup/collect</abs_path>
      <retain_days>0</retain_days>
   </dir>
</purge>


The following elements are part of the purge configuration section:

dir

    A directory to purge within.

    This is a subsection which contains information about a specific directory
    to purge within.

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    purge directory must be configured.

    The purge directory subsection contains the following fields:

    abs_path

        Absolute path of the directory to purge within.

        The contents of the directory will be purged based on age. The purge
        will remove any files that were last modified more than ?retain days?
        days ago. Empty directories will also eventually be removed. The purge
        directory itself will never be removed.

        The path may be either a directory, a soft link to a directory, or a
        hard link to a directory. Soft links within the directory (if any) are
        treated as files.

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

    retain_days

        Number of days to retain old files.

        Once it has been more than this many days since a file was last
        modified, it is a candidate for removal.

        Restrictions: Must be an integer ? 0.

Extensions Configuration

The extensions configuration section is used to configure third-party
extensions to Cedar Backup. If you don't intend to use any extensions, or don't
know what extensions are, then you can safely leave this section out of your
configuration file. It is optional.

Extensions configuration is used to specify ?extended actions? implemented by
code external to Cedar Backup. An administrator can use this section to map
command-line Cedar Backup actions to third-party extension functions.

Each extended action has a name, which is mapped to a Python function within a
particular module. Each action also has an index associated with it. This index
is used to properly order execution when more than one action is specified on
the command line. The standard actions have predefined indexes, and extended
actions are interleaved into the normal order of execution using those indexes.
The collect action has index 100, the stage index has action 200, the store
action has index 300 and the purge action has index 400.

Warning

Extended actions should always be configured to run before the standard action
they are associated with. This is because of the way indicator files are used
in Cedar Backup. For instance, the staging process considers the collect action
to be complete for a peer if the file cback.collect can be found in that peer's
collect directory.

If you were to run the standard collect action before your other collect-like
actions, the indicator file would be written after the collect action completes
but before all of the other actions even run. Because of this, there's a chance
the stage process might back up the collect directory before the entire set of
collect-like actions have completed ? and you would get no warning about this
in your email!

So, imagine that a third-party developer provided a Cedar Backup extension to
back up a certain kind of database repository, and you wanted to map that
extension to the ?database? command-line action. You have been told that this
function is called ?foo.bar()?. You think of this backup as a ?collect? kind of
action, so you want it to be performed immediately before the collect action.

To configure this extension, you would list an action with a name ?database?, a
module ?foo?, a function name ?bar? and an index of ?99?.

This is how the hypothetical action would be configured:

<extensions>
   <action>
      <name>database</name>
      <module>foo</module>
      <function>bar</function>
      <index>99</index>
   </action>
</extensions>


The following elements are part of the extensions configuration section:

action

    This is a subsection that contains configuration related to a single
    extended action.

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary.

    The action subsection contains the following fields:

    name

        Name of the extended action.

        Restrictions: Must be a non-empty string consisting of only lower-case
        letters and digits.

    module

        Name of the Python module associated with the extension function.

        Restrictions: Must be a non-empty string and a valid Python identifier.

    function

        Name of the Python extension function within the module.

        Restrictions: Must be a non-empty string and a valid Python identifier.

    index

        Index of action, for execution ordering.

        Restrictions: Must be an integer ? 0.

Setting up a Pool of One

Cedar Backup has been designed primarily for situations where there is a single
master and a set of other clients that the master interacts with. However, it
will just as easily work for a single machine (a backup pool of one).

Once you complete all of these configuration steps, your backups will run as
scheduled out of cron. Any errors that occur will be reported in daily emails
to your root user (or the user that receives root's email). If you don't
receive any emails, then you know your backup worked.

Note: all of these configuration steps should be run as the root user, unless
otherwise indicated.

Tip

This setup procedure discusses how to set up Cedar Backup in the ?normal case?
for a pool of one. If you would like to modify the way Cedar Backup works (for
instance, by ignoring the store stage and just letting your backup sit in a
staging directory), you can do that. You'll just have to modify the procedure
below based on information in the remainder of the manual.

Step 1: Decide when you will run your backup.

There are four parts to a Cedar Backup run: collect, stage, store and purge.
The usual way of setting off these steps is through a set of cron jobs.
Although you won't create your cron jobs just yet, you should decide now when
you will run your backup so you are prepared for later.

Backing up large directories and creating ISO filesystem images can be
intensive operations, and could slow your computer down significantly. Choose a
backup time that will not interfere with normal use of your computer. Usually,
you will want the backup to occur every day, but it is possible to configure
cron to execute the backup only one day per week, three days per week, etc.

Warning

Because of the way Cedar Backup works, you must ensure that your backup always
runs on the first day of your configured week. This is because Cedar Backup
will only clear incremental backup information and re-initialize your media
when running on the first day of the week. If you skip running Cedar Backup on
the first day of the week, your backups will likely be ?confused? until the
next week begins, or until you re-run the backup using the --full flag.

Step 2: Make sure email works.

Cedar Backup relies on email for problem notification. This notification works
through the magic of cron. Cron will email any output from each job it executes
to the user associated with the job. Since by default Cedar Backup only writes
output to the terminal if errors occur, this ensures that notification emails
will only be sent out if errors occur.

In order to receive problem notifications, you must make sure that email works
for the user which is running the Cedar Backup cron jobs (typically root).
Refer to your distribution's documentation for information on how to configure
email on your system. Note that you may prefer to configure root's email to
forward to some other user, so you do not need to check the root user's mail in
order to see Cedar Backup errors.

Step 3: Configure your writer device.

Before using Cedar Backup, your writer device must be properly configured. If
you have configured your CD/DVD writer hardware to work through the normal
filesystem device path, then you just need to know the path to the device on
disk (something like /dev/cdrw). Cedar Backup will use the this device path
both when talking to a command like cdrecord and when doing filesystem
operations like running media validation.

Your other option is to configure your CD writer hardware like a SCSI device
(either because it is a SCSI device or because you are using some sort of
interface that makes it look like one). In this case, Cedar Backup will use the
SCSI id when talking to cdrecord and the device path when running filesystem
operations.

See the section called ?Configuring your Writer Device? for more information on
writer devices and how they are configured.

Note

There is no need to set up your CD/DVD device if you have decided not to
execute the store action.

Due to the underlying utilities that Cedar Backup uses, the SCSI id may only be
used for CD writers, not DVD writers.

Step 4: Configure your backup user.

Choose a user to be used for backups. Some platforms may come with a ?ready
made? backup user. For other platforms, you may have to create a user yourself.
You may choose any id you like, but a descriptive name such as backup or cback
is a good choice. See your distribution's documentation for information on how
to add a user.

Note

Standard Debian systems come with a user named backup. You may choose to stay
with this user or create another one.

Step 5: Create your backup tree.

Cedar Backup requires a backup directory tree on disk. This directory tree must
be roughly three times as big as the amount of data that will be backed up on a
nightly basis, to allow for the data to be collected, staged, and then placed
into an ISO filesystem image on disk. (This is one disadvantage to using Cedar
Backup in single-machine pools, but in this day of really large hard drives, it
might not be an issue.) Note that if you elect not to purge the staging
directory every night, you will need even more space.

You should create a collect directory, a staging directory and a working
(temporary) directory. One recommended layout is this:

/opt/
     backup/
            collect/
            stage/
            tmp/


If you will be backing up sensitive information (i.e. password files), it is
recommended that these directories be owned by the backup user (whatever you
named it), with permissions 700.

Note

You don't have to use /opt as the root of your directory structure. Use
anything you would like. I use /opt because it is my ?dumping ground? for
filesystems that Debian does not manage.

Some users have requested that the Debian packages set up a more ?standard?
location for backups right out-of-the-box. I have resisted doing this because
it's difficult to choose an appropriate backup location from within the
package. If you would prefer, you can create the backup directory structure
within some existing Debian directory such as /var/backups or /var/tmp.

Step 6: Create the Cedar Backup configuration file.

Following the instructions in the section called ?Configuration File Format?
(above) create a configuration file for your machine. Since you are working
with a pool of one, you must configure all four action-specific sections:
collect, stage, store and purge.

The usual location for the Cedar Backup config file is /etc/cback.conf. If you
change the location, make sure you edit your cronjobs (below) to point the 
cback script at the correct config file (using the --config option).

Warning

Configuration files should always be writable only by root (or by the file
owner, if the owner is not root).

If you intend to place confidential information into the Cedar Backup
configuration file, make sure that you set the filesystem permissions on the
file appropriately. For instance, if you configure any extensions that require
passwords or other similar information, you should make the file readable only
to root or to the file owner (if the owner is not root).

Step 7: Validate the Cedar Backup configuration file.

Use the command cback validate to validate your configuration file. This
command checks that the configuration file can be found and parsed, and also
checks for typical configuration problems, such as invalid CD/DVD device
entries.

Note: the most common cause of configuration problems is in not closing XML
tags properly. Any XML tag that is ?opened? must be ?closed? appropriately.

Step 8: Test your backup.

Place a valid CD/DVD disc in your drive, and then use the command cback --full
all. You should execute this command as root. If the command completes with no
output, then the backup was run successfully.

Just to be sure that everything worked properly, check the logfile (/var/log/
cback.log) for errors and also mount the CD/DVD disc to be sure it can be read.

If Cedar Backup ever completes ?normally? but the disc that is created is not
usable, please report this as a bug. ^[22] To be safe, always enable the
consistency check option in the store configuration section.

Step 9: Modify the backup cron jobs.

Since Cedar Backup should be run as root, one way to configure the cron job is
to add a line like this to your /etc/crontab file:

30 00 * * * root  cback all


Or, you can create an executable script containing just these lines and place
that file in the /etc/cron.daily directory:

#/bin/sh
cback all


You should consider adding the --output or -O switch to your cback command-line
in cron. This will result in larger logs, but could help diagnose problems when
commands like cdrecord or mkisofs fail mysteriously.

Note

For general information about using cron, see the manpage for crontab(5).

On a Debian system, execution of daily backups is controlled by the file /etc/
cron.d/cedar-backup2. As installed, this file contains several different
settings, all commented out. Uncomment the ?Single machine (pool of one)? entry
in the file, and change the line so that the backup goes off when you want it
to.

Setting up a Client Peer Node

Cedar Backup has been designed to backup entire ?pools? of machines. In any
given pool, there is one master and some number of clients. Most of the work
takes place on the master, so configuring a client is a little simpler than
configuring a master.

Backups are designed to take place over an RSH or SSH connection. Because RSH
is generally considered insecure, you are encouraged to use SSH rather than
RSH. This document will only describe how to configure Cedar Backup to use SSH;
if you want to use RSH, you're on your own.

Once you complete all of these configuration steps, your backups will run as
scheduled out of cron. Any errors that occur will be reported in daily emails
to your root user (or the user that receives root's email). If you don't
receive any emails, then you know your backup worked.

Note: all of these configuration steps should be run as the root user, unless
otherwise indicated.

Note

See Appendix D, Securing Password-less SSH Connections for some important notes
on how to optionally further secure password-less SSH connections to your
clients.

Step 1: Decide when you will run your backup.

There are four parts to a Cedar Backup run: collect, stage, store and purge.
The usual way of setting off these steps is through a set of cron jobs.
Although you won't create your cron jobs just yet, you should decide now when
you will run your backup so you are prepared for later.

Backing up large directories and creating ISO filesystem images can be
intensive operations, and could slow your computer down significantly. Choose a
backup time that will not interfere with normal use of your computer. Usually,
you will want the backup to occur every day, but it is possible to configure
cron to execute the backup only one day per week, three days per week, etc.

Warning

Because of the way Cedar Backup works, you must ensure that your backup always
runs on the first day of your configured week. This is because Cedar Backup
will only clear incremental backup information and re-initialize your media
when running on the first day of the week. If you skip running Cedar Backup on
the first day of the week, your backups will likely be ?confused? until the
next week begins, or until you re-run the backup using the --full flag.

Step 2: Make sure email works.

Cedar Backup relies on email for problem notification. This notification works
through the magic of cron. Cron will email any output from each job it executes
to the user associated with the job. Since by default Cedar Backup only writes
output to the terminal if errors occur, this neatly ensures that notification
emails will only be sent out if errors occur.

In order to receive problem notifications, you must make sure that email works
for the user which is running the Cedar Backup cron jobs (typically root).
Refer to your distribution's documentation for information on how to configure
email on your system. Note that you may prefer to configure root's email to
forward to some other user, so you do not need to check the root user's mail in
order to see Cedar Backup errors.

Step 3: Configure the master in your backup pool.

You will not be able to complete the client configuration until at least step 3
of the master's configuration has been completed. In particular, you will need
to know the master's public SSH identity to fully configure a client.

To find the master's public SSH identity, log in as the backup user on the
master and cat the public identity file ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub:

user@machine> cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEA0vOKjlfwohPg1oPRdrmwHk75l3mI9Tb/WRZfVnu2Pw69
uyphM9wBLRo6QfOC2T8vZCB8o/ZIgtAM3tkM0UgQHxKBXAZ+H36TOgg7BcI20I93iGtzpsMA/uXQy8kH
HgZooYqQ9pw+ZduXgmPcAAv2b5eTm07wRqFt/U84k6bhTzs= user@machine


Step 4: Configure your backup user.

Choose a user to be used for backups. Some platforms may come with a "ready
made" backup user. For other platforms, you may have to create a user yourself.
You may choose any id you like, but a descriptive name such as backup or cback
is a good choice. See your distribution's documentation for information on how
to add a user.

Note

Standard Debian systems come with a user named backup. You may choose to stay
with this user or create another one.

Once you have created your backup user, you must create an SSH keypair for it.
Log in as your backup user, and then run the command ssh-keygen -t rsa -N "" -f
~/.ssh/id_rsa:

user@machine> ssh-keygen -t rsa -N "" -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Created directory '/home/user/.ssh'.
Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
11:3e:ad:72:95:fe:96:dc:1e:3b:f4:cc:2c:ff:15:9e user@machine


The default permissions for this directory should be fine. However, if the
directory existed before you ran ssh-keygen, then you may need to modify the
permissions. Make sure that the ~/.ssh directory is readable only by the backup
user (i.e. mode 700), that the ~/.ssh/id_rsa file is only readable and writable
only by the backup user (i.e. mode 600) and that the ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub file is
writable only by the backup user (i.e. mode 600 or mode 644).

Finally, take the master's public SSH identity (which you found in step 2) and
cut-and-paste it into the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Make sure the identity
value is pasted into the file all on one line, and that the authorized_keys
file is owned by your backup user and has permissions 600.

If you have other preferences or standard ways of setting up your users' SSH
configuration (i.e. different key type, etc.), feel free to do things your way.
The important part is that the master must be able to SSH into a client with no
password entry required.

Step 5: Create your backup tree.

Cedar Backup requires a backup directory tree on disk. This directory tree must
be roughly as big as the amount of data that will be backed up on a nightly
basis (more if you elect not to purge it all every night).

You should create a collect directory and a working (temporary) directory. One
recommended layout is this:

/opt/
     backup/
            collect/
            tmp/


If you will be backing up sensitive information (i.e. password files), it is
recommended that these directories be owned by the backup user (whatever you
named it), with permissions 700.

Note

You don't have to use /opt as the root of your directory structure. Use
anything you would like. I use /opt because it is my ?dumping ground? for
filesystems that Debian does not manage.

Some users have requested that the Debian packages set up a more "standard"
location for backups right out-of-the-box. I have resisted doing this because
it's difficult to choose an appropriate backup location from within the
package. If you would prefer, you can create the backup directory structure
within some existing Debian directory such as /var/backups or /var/tmp.

Step 6: Create the Cedar Backup configuration file.

Following the instructions in the section called ?Configuration File Format?
(above), create a configuration file for your machine. Since you are working
with a client, you must configure all action-specific sections for the collect
and purge actions.

The usual location for the Cedar Backup config file is /etc/cback.conf. If you
change the location, make sure you edit your cronjobs (below) to point the 
cback script at the correct config file (using the --config option).

Warning

Configuration files should always be writable only by root (or by the file
owner, if the owner is not root).

If you intend to place confidental information into the Cedar Backup
configuration file, make sure that you set the filesystem permissions on the
file appropriately. For instance, if you configure any extensions that require
passwords or other similar information, you should make the file readable only
to root or to the file owner (if the owner is not root).

Step 7: Validate the Cedar Backup configuration file.

Use the command cback validate to validate your configuration file. This
command checks that the configuration file can be found and parsed, and also
checks for typical configuration problems. This command only validates
configuration on the one client, not the master or any other clients in a pool.

Note: the most common cause of configuration problems is in not closing XML
tags properly. Any XML tag that is ?opened? must be ?closed? appropriately.

Step 8: Test your backup.

Use the command cback --full collect purge. If the command completes with no
output, then the backup was run successfully. Just to be sure that everything
worked properly, check the logfile (/var/log/cback.log) for errors.

Step 9: Modify the backup cron jobs.

Since Cedar Backup should be run as root, you should add a set of lines like
this to your /etc/crontab file:

30 00 * * * root  cback collect
30 06 * * * root  cback purge


You should consider adding the --output or -O switch to your cback command-line
in cron. This will result in larger logs, but could help diagnose problems when
commands like cdrecord or mkisofs fail mysteriously.

You will need to coordinate the collect and purge actions on the client so that
the collect action completes before the master attempts to stage, and so that
the purge action does not begin until after the master has completed staging.
Usually, allowing an hour or two between steps should be sufficient. ^[23]

Note

For general information about using cron, see the manpage for crontab(5).

On a Debian system, execution of daily backups is controlled by the file /etc/
cron.d/cedar-backup2. As installed, this file contains several different
settings, all commented out. Uncomment the ?Client machine? entries in the
file, and change the lines so that the backup goes off when you want it to.

Setting up a Master Peer Node

Cedar Backup has been designed to backup entire ?pools? of machines. In any
given pool, there is one master and some number of clients. Most of the work
takes place on the master, so configuring a master is somewhat more complicated
than configuring a client.

Backups are designed to take place over an RSH or SSH connection. Because RSH
is generally considered insecure, you are encouraged to use SSH rather than
RSH. This document will only describe how to configure Cedar Backup to use SSH;
if you want to use RSH, you're on your own.

Once you complete all of these configuration steps, your backups will run as
scheduled out of cron. Any errors that occur will be reported in daily emails
to your root user (or whichever other user receives root's email). If you don't
receive any emails, then you know your backup worked.

Note: all of these configuration steps should be run as the root user, unless
otherwise indicated.

Tip

This setup procedure discusses how to set up Cedar Backup in the ?normal case?
for a master. If you would like to modify the way Cedar Backup works (for
instance, by ignoring the store stage and just letting your backup sit in a
staging directory), you can do that. You'll just have to modify the procedure
below based on information in the remainder of the manual.

Step 1: Decide when you will run your backup.

There are four parts to a Cedar Backup run: collect, stage, store and purge.
The usual way of setting off these steps is through a set of cron jobs.
Although you won't create your cron jobs just yet, you should decide now when
you will run your backup so you are prepared for later.

Keep in mind that you do not necessarily have to run the collect action on the
master. See notes further below for more information.

Backing up large directories and creating ISO filesystem images can be
intensive operations, and could slow your computer down significantly. Choose a
backup time that will not interfere with normal use of your computer. Usually,
you will want the backup to occur every day, but it is possible to configure
cron to execute the backup only one day per week, three days per week, etc.

Warning

Because of the way Cedar Backup works, you must ensure that your backup always
runs on the first day of your configured week. This is because Cedar Backup
will only clear incremental backup information and re-initialize your media
when running on the first day of the week. If you skip running Cedar Backup on
the first day of the week, your backups will likely be ?confused? until the
next week begins, or until you re-run the backup using the --full flag.

Step 2: Make sure email works.

Cedar Backup relies on email for problem notification. This notification works
through the magic of cron. Cron will email any output from each job it executes
to the user associated with the job. Since by default Cedar Backup only writes
output to the terminal if errors occur, this neatly ensures that notification
emails will only be sent out if errors occur.

In order to receive problem notifications, you must make sure that email works
for the user which is running the Cedar Backup cron jobs (typically root).
Refer to your distribution's documentation for information on how to configure
email on your system. Note that you may prefer to configure root's email to
forward to some other user, so you do not need to check the root user's mail in
order to see Cedar Backup errors.

Step 3: Configure your writer device.

Before using Cedar Backup, your writer device must be properly configured. If
you have configured your CD/DVD writer hardware to work through the normal
filesystem device path, then you just need to know the path to the device on
disk (something like /dev/cdrw). Cedar Backup will use the this device path
both when talking to a command like cdrecord and when doing filesystem
operations like running media validation.

Your other option is to configure your CD writer hardware like a SCSI device
(either because it is a SCSI device or because you are using some sort of
interface that makes it look like one). In this case, Cedar Backup will use the
SCSI id when talking to cdrecord and the device path when running filesystem
operations.

See the section called ?Configuring your Writer Device? for more information on
writer devices and how they are configured.

Note

There is no need to set up your CD/DVD device if you have decided not to
execute the store action.

Due to the underlying utilities that Cedar Backup uses, the SCSI id may only be
used for CD writers, not DVD writers.

Step 4: Configure your backup user.

Choose a user to be used for backups. Some platforms may come with a ?ready
made? backup user. For other platforms, you may have to create a user yourself.
You may choose any id you like, but a descriptive name such as backup or cback
is a good choice. See your distribution's documentation for information on how
to add a user.

Note

Standard Debian systems come with a user named backup. You may choose to stay
with this user or create another one.

Once you have created your backup user, you must create an SSH keypair for it.
Log in as your backup user, and then run the command ssh-keygen -t rsa -N "" -f
~/.ssh/id_rsa:

user@machine> ssh-keygen -t rsa -N "" -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Created directory '/home/user/.ssh'.
Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
11:3e:ad:72:95:fe:96:dc:1e:3b:f4:cc:2c:ff:15:9e user@machine


The default permissions for this directory should be fine. However, if the
directory existed before you ran ssh-keygen, then you may need to modify the
permissions. Make sure that the ~/.ssh directory is readable only by the backup
user (i.e. mode 700), that the ~/.ssh/id_rsa file is only readable and writable
by the backup user (i.e. mode 600) and that the ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub file is
writable only by the backup user (i.e. mode 600 or mode 644).

If you have other preferences or standard ways of setting up your users' SSH
configuration (i.e. different key type, etc.), feel free to do things your way.
The important part is that the master must be able to SSH into a client with no
password entry required.

Step 5: Create your backup tree.

Cedar Backup requires a backup directory tree on disk. This directory tree must
be roughly large enough hold twice as much data as will be backed up from the
entire pool on a given night, plus space for whatever is collected on the
master itself. This will allow for all three operations - collect, stage and
store - to have enough space to complete. Note that if you elect not to purge
the staging directory every night, you will need even more space.

You should create a collect directory, a staging directory and a working
(temporary) directory. One recommended layout is this:

/opt/
     backup/
            collect/
            stage/
            tmp/


If you will be backing up sensitive information (i.e. password files), it is
recommended that these directories be owned by the backup user (whatever you
named it), with permissions 700.

Note

You don't have to use /opt as the root of your directory structure. Use
anything you would like. I use /opt because it is my ?dumping ground? for
filesystems that Debian does not manage.

Some users have requested that the Debian packages set up a more ?standard?
location for backups right out-of-the-box. I have resisted doing this because
it's difficult to choose an appropriate backup location from within the
package. If you would prefer, you can create the backup directory structure
within some existing Debian directory such as /var/backups or /var/tmp.

Step 6: Create the Cedar Backup configuration file.

Following the instructions in the section called ?Configuration File Format?
(above), create a configuration file for your machine. Since you are working
with a master machine, you would typically configure all four action-specific
sections: collect, stage, store and purge.

Note

Note that the master can treat itself as a ?client? peer for certain actions.
As an example, if you run the collect action on the master, then you will stage
that data by configuring a local peer representing the master.

Something else to keep in mind is that you do not really have to run the
collect action on the master. For instance, you may prefer to just use your
master machine as a ?consolidation point? machine that just collects data from
the other client machines in a backup pool. In that case, there is no need to
collect data on the master itself.

The usual location for the Cedar Backup config file is /etc/cback.conf. If you
change the location, make sure you edit your cronjobs (below) to point the 
cback script at the correct config file (using the --config option).

Warning

Configuration files should always be writable only by root (or by the file
owner, if the owner is not root).

If you intend to place confidental information into the Cedar Backup
configuration file, make sure that you set the filesystem permissions on the
file appropriately. For instance, if you configure any extensions that require
passwords or other similar information, you should make the file readable only
to root or to the file owner (if the owner is not root).

Step 7: Validate the Cedar Backup configuration file.

Use the command cback validate to validate your configuration file. This
command checks that the configuration file can be found and parsed, and also
checks for typical configuration problems, such as invalid CD/DVD device
entries. This command only validates configuration on the master, not any
clients that the master might be configured to connect to.

Note: the most common cause of configuration problems is in not closing XML
tags properly. Any XML tag that is ?opened? must be ?closed? appropriately.

Step 8: Test connectivity to client machines.

This step must wait until after your client machines have been at least
partially configured. Once the backup user(s) have been configured on the
client machine(s) in a pool, attempt an SSH connection to each client.

Log in as the backup user on the master, and then use the command ssh
user@machine where user is the name of backup user on the client machine, and
machine is the name of the client machine.

If you are able to log in successfully to each client without entering a
password, then things have been configured properly. Otherwise, double-check
that you followed the user setup instructions for the master and the clients.

Step 9: Test your backup.

Make sure that you have configured all of the clients in your backup pool. On
all of the clients, execute cback --full collect. (You will probably have
already tested this command on each of the clients, so it should succeed.)

When all of the client backups have completed, place a valid CD/DVD disc in
your drive, and then use the command cback --full all. You should execute this
command as root. If the command completes with no output, then the backup was
run successfully.

Just to be sure that everything worked properly, check the logfile (/var/log/
cback.log) on the master and each of the clients, and also mount the CD/DVD
disc on the master to be sure it can be read.

You may also want to run cback purge on the master and each client once you
have finished validating that everything worked.

If Cedar Backup ever completes ?normally? but the disc that is created is not
usable, please report this as a bug. ^[22] To be safe, always enable the
consistency check option in the store configuration section.

Step 10: Modify the backup cron jobs.

Since Cedar Backup should be run as root, you should add a set of lines like
this to your /etc/crontab file:

30 00 * * * root  cback collect
30 02 * * * root  cback stage
30 04 * * * root  cback store
30 06 * * * root  cback purge


You should consider adding the --output or -O switch to your cback command-line
in cron. This will result in larger logs, but could help diagnose problems when
commands like cdrecord or mkisofs fail mysteriously.

You will need to coordinate the collect and purge actions on clients so that
their collect actions complete before the master attempts to stage, and so that
their purge actions do not begin until after the master has completed staging.
Usually, allowing an hour or two between steps should be sufficient. ^[23]

Note

For general information about using cron, see the manpage for crontab(5).

On a Debian system, execution of daily backups is controlled by the file /etc/
cron.d/cedar-backup2. As installed, this file contains several different
settings, all commented out. Uncomment the ?Master machine? entries in the
file, and change the lines so that the backup goes off when you want it to.

Configuring your Writer Device

Device Types

In order to execute the store action, you need to know how to identify your
writer device. Cedar Backup supports two kinds of device types: CD writers and
DVD writers. DVD writers are always referenced through a filesystem device name
(i.e. /dev/dvd). CD writers can be referenced either through a SCSI id, or
through a filesystem device name. Which you use depends on your operating
system and hardware.

Devices identified by by device name

For all DVD writers, and for CD writers on certain platforms, you will
configure your writer device using only a device name. If your writer device
works this way, you should just specify <target_device> in configuration. You
can either leave <target_scsi_id> blank or remove it completely. The writer
device will be used both to write to the device and for filesystem operations ?
for instance, when the media needs to be mounted to run the consistency check.

Devices identified by SCSI id

Cedar Backup can use devices identified by SCSI id only when configured to use
the cdwriter device type.

In order to use a SCSI device with Cedar Backup, you must know both the SCSI id
<target_scsi_id> and the device name <target_device>. The SCSI id will be used
to write to media using cdrecord; and the device name will be used for other
filesystem operations.

A true SCSI device will always have an address scsibus,target,lun (i.e. 1,6,2).
This should hold true on most UNIX-like systems including Linux and the various
BSDs (although I do not have a BSD system to test with currently). The SCSI
address represents the location of your writer device on the one or more SCSI
buses that you have available on your system.

On some platforms, it is possible to reference non-SCSI writer devices (i.e. an
IDE CD writer) using an emulated SCSI id. If you have configured your non-SCSI
writer device to have an emulated SCSI id, provide the filesystem device path
in <target_device> and the SCSI id in <target_scsi_id>, just like for a real
SCSI device.

You should note that in some cases, an emulated SCSI id takes the same form as
a normal SCSI id, while in other cases you might see a method name prepended to
the normal SCSI id (i.e. ?ATA:1,1,1?).

Linux Notes

On a Linux system, IDE writer devices often have a emulated SCSI address, which
allows SCSI-based software to access the device through an IDE-to-SCSI
interface. Under these circumstances, the first IDE writer device typically has
an address 0,0,0. However, support for the IDE-to-SCSI interface has been
deprecated and is not well-supported in newer kernels (kernel 2.6.x and later).

Newer Linux kernels can address ATA or ATAPI drives without SCSI emulation by
prepending a ?method? indicator to the emulated device address. For instance,
ATA:0,0,0 or ATAPI:0,0,0 are typical values.

However, even this interface is deprecated as of late 2006, so with relatively
new kernels you may be better off using the filesystem device path directly
rather than relying on any SCSI emulation.

Finding your Linux CD Writer

Here are some hints about how to find your Linux CD writer hardware. First, try
to reference your device using the filesystem device path:

cdrecord -prcap dev=/dev/cdrom


Running this command on my hardware gives output that looks like this (just the
top few lines):

Device type    : Removable CD-ROM
Version        : 0
Response Format: 2
Capabilities   :
Vendor_info    : 'LITE-ON '
Identification : 'DVDRW SOHW-1673S'
Revision       : 'JS02'
Device seems to be: Generic mmc2 DVD-R/DVD-RW.

Drive capabilities, per MMC-3 page 2A:


If this works, and the identifying information at the top of the output looks
like your CD writer device, you've probably found a working configuration.
Place the device path into <target_device> and leave <target_scsi_id> blank.

If this doesn't work, you should try to find an ATA or ATAPI device:

cdrecord -scanbus dev=ATA
cdrecord -scanbus dev=ATAPI


On my development system, I get a result that looks something like this for
ATA:

scsibus1:
        1,0,0   100) 'LITE-ON ' 'DVDRW SOHW-1673S' 'JS02' Removable CD-ROM
        1,1,0   101) *
        1,2,0   102) *
        1,3,0   103) *
        1,4,0   104) *
        1,5,0   105) *
        1,6,0   106) *
        1,7,0   107) *


Again, if you get a result that you recognize, you have again probably found a
working configuraton. Place the associated device path (in my case, /dev/cdrom)
into <target_device> and put the emulated SCSI id (in this case, ATA:1,0,0)
into <target_scsi_id>.

Any further discussion of how to configure your CD writer hardware is outside
the scope of this document. If you have tried the hints above and still can't
get things working, you may want to reference the Linux CDROM HOWTO (http://
www.tldp.org/HOWTO/CDROM-HOWTO) or the ATA RAID HOWTO (http://www.tldp.org/
HOWTO/ATA-RAID-HOWTO/index.html) for more information.

Mac OS X Notes

On a Mac OS X (darwin) system, things get strange. Apple has abandoned
traditional SCSI device identifiers in favor of a system-wide resource id. So,
on a Mac, your writer device will have a name something like
IOCompactDiscServices (for a CD writer) or IODVDServices (for a DVD writer). If
you have multiple drives, the second drive probably has a number appended, i.e.
IODVDServices/2 for the second DVD writer. You can try to figure out what the
name of your device is by grepping through the output of the command ioreg -l.^
[24]

Unfortunately, even if you can figure out what device to use, I can't really
support the store action on this platform. In OS X, the ?automount? function of
the Finder interferes significantly with Cedar Backup's ability to mount and
unmount media and write to the CD or DVD hardware. The Cedar Backup writer and
image functionality does work on this platform, but the effort required to
fight the operating system about who owns the media and the device makes it
nearly impossible to execute the store action successfully.

If you are interested in some of my notes about what works and what doesn't on
this platform, check out the documentation in the doc/osx directory in the
source distribution.

Optimized Blanking Stategy

When the optimized blanking strategy has not been configured, Cedar Backup uses
a simplistic approach: rewritable media is blanked at the beginning of every
week, period.

Since rewritable media can be blanked only a finite number of times before
becoming unusable, some users ? especially users of rewritable DVD media with
its large capacity ? may prefer to blank the media less often.

If the optimized blanking strategy is configured, Cedar Backup will use a
blanking factor and attempt to determine whether future backups will fit on the
current media. If it looks like backups will fit, then the media will not be
blanked.

This feature will only be useful (assuming single disc is used for the whole
week's backups) if the estimated total size of the weekly backup is
considerably smaller than the capacity of the media (no more than 50% of the
total media capacity), and only if the size of the backup can be expected to
remain fairly constant over time (no frequent rapid growth expected).

There are two blanking modes: daily and weekly. If the weekly blanking mode is
set, Cedar Backup will only estimate future capacity (and potentially blank the
disc) once per week, on the starting day of the week. If the daily blanking
mode is set, Cedar Backup will estimate future capacity (and potentially blank
the disc) every time it is run. You should only use the daily blanking mode in
conjunction with daily collect configuration, otherwise you will risk losing
data.

If you are using the daily blanking mode, you can typically set the blanking
value to 1.0. This will cause Cedar Backup to blank the media whenever there is
not enough space to store the current day's backup.

If you are using the weekly blanking mode, then finding the correct blanking
factor will require some experimentation. Cedar Backup estimates future
capacity based on the configured blanking factor. The disc will be blanked if
the following relationship is true:

bytes available / (1 + bytes required) ? blanking factor


Another way to look at this is to consider the blanking factor as a sort of
(upper) backup growth estimate:

Total size of weekly backup / Full backup size at the start of the week


This ratio can be estimated using a week or two of previous backups. For
instance, take this example, where March 10 is the start of the week and March
4 through March 9 represent the incremental backups from the previous week:

/opt/backup/staging# du -s 2007/03/*
3040    2007/03/01
3044    2007/03/02
6812    2007/03/03
3044    2007/03/04
3152    2007/03/05
3056    2007/03/06
3060    2007/03/07
3056    2007/03/08
4776    2007/03/09
6812    2007/03/10
11824   2007/03/11


In this case, the ratio is approximately 4:

6812 + (3044 + 3152 + 3056 + 3060 + 3056 + 4776) / 6812 = 3.9571


To be safe, you might choose to configure a factor of 5.0.

Setting a higher value reduces the risk of exceeding media capacity mid-week
but might result in blanking the media more often than is necessary.

If you run out of space mid-week, then the solution is to run the rebuild
action. If this happens frequently, a higher blanking factor value should be
used.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

^[19] See http://www.xml.com/pub/a/98/10/guide0.html for a basic introduction
to XML.

^[20] See the section called ?The Backup Process?, in Chapter 2, Basic Concepts
.

^[21] See http://docs.python.org/lib/re-syntax.html

^[22] See https://bitbucket.org/cedarsolutions/cedar-backup2/issues.

^[23] See the section called ?Coordination between Master and Clients? in
Chapter 2, Basic Concepts.

^[24] Thanks to the file README.macosX in the cdrtools-2.01+01a01 source tree
for this information

Chapter 6. Official Extensions

Table of Contents

System Information Extension
Amazon S3 Extension
Subversion Extension
MySQL Extension
PostgreSQL Extension
Mbox Extension
Encrypt Extension
Split Extension
Capacity Extension

System Information Extension

The System Information Extension is a simple Cedar Backup extension used to
save off important system recovery information that might be useful when
reconstructing a ?broken? system. It is intended to be run either immediately
before or immediately after the standard collect action.

This extension saves off the following information to the configured Cedar
Backup collect directory. Saved off data is always compressed using bzip2.

  * Currently-installed Debian packages via dpkg --get-selections

  * Disk partition information via fdisk -l

  * System-wide mounted filesystem contents, via ls -laR

The Debian-specific information is only collected on systems where /usr/bin/
dpkg exists.

To enable this extension, add the following section to the Cedar Backup
configuration file:

<extensions>
   <action>
      <name>sysinfo</name>
      <module>CedarBackup2.extend.sysinfo</module>
      <function>executeAction</function>
      <index>99</index>
   </action>
</extensions>


This extension relies on the options and collect configuration sections in the
standard Cedar Backup configuration file, but requires no new configuration of
its own.

Amazon S3 Extension

The Amazon S3 extension writes data to Amazon S3 cloud storage rather than to
physical media. It is intended to replace the store action, but you can also
use it alongside the store action if you'd prefer to backup your data in more
than one place. This extension must be run after the stage action.

The underlying functionality relies on the AWS CLI toolset. Before you use this
extension, you need to set up your Amazon S3 account and configure AWS CLI as
detailed in Amazons's setup guide. The extension assumes that the backup is
being executed as root, and switches over to the configured backup user to run
the aws program. So, make sure you configure the AWS CLI tools as the backup
user and not root. (This is different than the amazons3 sync tool extension,
which executes AWS CLI command as the same user that is running the tool.)

When using physical media via the standard store action, there is an implicit
limit to the size of a backup, since a backup must fit on a single disc. Since
there is no physical media, no such limit exists for Amazon S3 backups. This
leaves open the possibility that Cedar Backup might construct an
unexpectedly-large backup that the administrator is not aware of. Over time,
this might become expensive, either in terms of network bandwidth or in terms
of Amazon S3 storage and I/O charges. To mitigate this risk, set a reasonable
maximum size using the configuration elements shown below. If the backup fails,
you have a chance to review what made the backup larger than you expected, and
you can either correct the problem (i.e. remove a large temporary directory
that got inadvertently included in the backup) or change configuration to take
into account the new "normal" maximum size.

You can optionally configure Cedar Backup to encrypt data before sending it to
S3. To do that, provide a complete command line using the ${input} and $
{output} variables to represent the original input file and the encrypted
output file. This command will be executed as the backup user.

For instance, you can use something like this with GPG:

/usr/bin/gpg -c --no-use-agent --batch --yes --passphrase-file /home/backup/.passphrase -o ${output} ${input}


The GPG mechanism depends on a strong passphrase for security. One way to
generate a strong passphrase is using your system random number generator,
i.e.:

dd if=/dev/urandom count=20 bs=1 | xxd -ps


(See StackExchange for more details about that advice.) If you decide to use
encryption, make sure you save off the passphrase in a safe place, so you can
get at your backup data later if you need to. And obviously, make sure to set
permissions on the passphrase file so it can only be read by the backup user.

To enable this extension, add the following section to the Cedar Backup
configuration file:

<extensions>
   <action>
      <name>amazons3</name>
      <module>CedarBackup2.extend.amazons3</module>
      <function>executeAction</function>
      <index>201</index> <!-- just after stage -->
   </action>
</extensions>


This extension relies on the options and staging configuration sections in the
standard Cedar Backup configuration file, and then also requires its own
amazons3 configuration section. This is an example configuration section with
encryption disabled:

<amazons3>
      <s3_bucket>example.com-backup/staging</s3_bucket>
</amazons3>


The following elements are part of the Amazon S3 configuration section:

warn_midnite

    Whether to generate warnings for crossing midnite.

    This field indicates whether warnings should be generated if the Amazon S3
    operation has to cross a midnite boundary in order to find data to write to
    the cloud. For instance, a warning would be generated if valid data was
    only found in the day before or day after the current day.

    Configuration for some users is such that the amazons3 operation will
    always cross a midnite boundary, so they will not care about this warning.
    Other users will expect to never cross a boundary, and want to be notified
    that something ?strange? might have happened.

    This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, then N will be assumed.

    Restrictions: Must be a boolean (Y or N).

s3_bucket

    The name of the Amazon S3 bucket that data will be written to.

    This field configures the S3 bucket that your data will be written to. In
    S3, buckets are named globally. For uniqueness, you would typically use the
    name of your domain followed by some suffix, such as example.com-backup. If
    you want, you can specify a subdirectory within the bucket, such as
    example.com-backup/staging.

    Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

encrypt

    Command used to encrypt backup data before upload to S3

    If this field is provided, then data will be encrypted before it is
    uploaded to Amazon S3. You must provide the entire command used to encrypt
    a file, including the ${input} and ${output} variables. An example GPG
    command is shown above, but you can use any mechanism you choose. The
    command will be run as the configured backup user.

    Restrictions: If provided, must be non-empty.

full_size_limit

    Maximum size of a full backup

    If this field is provided, then a size limit will be applied to full
    backups. If the total size of the selected staging directory is greater
    than the limit, then the backup will fail.

    You can enter this value in two different forms. It can either be a simple
    number, in which case the value is assumed to be in bytes; or it can be a
    number followed by a unit (KB, MB, GB).

    Valid examples are ?10240?, ?250 MB? or ?1.1 GB?.

    Restrictions: Must be a value as described above, greater than zero.

incr_size_limit

    Maximum size of an incremental backup

    If this field is provided, then a size limit will be applied to incremental
    backups. If the total size of the selected staging directory is greater
    than the limit, then the backup will fail.

    You can enter this value in two different forms. It can either be a simple
    number, in which case the value is assumed to be in bytes; or it can be a
    number followed by a unit (KB, MB, GB).

    Valid examples are ?10240?, ?250 MB? or ?1.1 GB?.

    Restrictions: Must be a value as described above, greater than zero.

Subversion Extension

The Subversion Extension is a Cedar Backup extension used to back up Subversion
^[25] version control repositories via the Cedar Backup command line. It is
intended to be run either immediately before or immediately after the standard
collect action.

Each configured Subversion repository can be backed using the same collect
modes allowed for filesystems in the standard Cedar Backup collect action
(weekly, daily, incremental) and the output can be compressed using either gzip
or bzip2.

There are two different kinds of Subversion repositories at this writing: BDB
(Berkeley Database) and FSFS (a "filesystem within a filesystem"). This
extension backs up both kinds of repositories in the same way, using svnadmin
dump in an incremental mode.

It turns out that FSFS repositories can also be backed up just like any other
filesystem directory. If you would rather do the backup that way, then use the
normal collect action rather than this extension. If you decide to do that, be
sure to consult the Subversion documentation and make sure you understand the
limitations of this kind of backup.

To enable this extension, add the following section to the Cedar Backup
configuration file:

<extensions>
   <action>
      <name>subversion</name>
      <module>CedarBackup2.extend.subversion</module>
      <function>executeAction</function>
      <index>99</index>
   </action>
</extensions>


This extension relies on the options and collect configuration sections in the
standard Cedar Backup configuration file, and then also requires its own
subversion configuration section. This is an example Subversion configuration
section:

<subversion>
   <collect_mode>incr</collect_mode>
   <compress_mode>bzip2</compress_mode>
   <repository>
      <abs_path>/opt/public/svn/docs</abs_path>
   </repository>
   <repository>
      <abs_path>/opt/public/svn/web</abs_path>
      <compress_mode>gzip</compress_mode>
   </repository>
   <repository_dir>
      <abs_path>/opt/private/svn</abs_path>
      <collect_mode>daily</collect_mode>
   </repository_dir>
</subversion>


The following elements are part of the Subversion configuration section:

collect_mode

    Default collect mode.

    The collect mode describes how frequently a Subversion repository is backed
    up. The Subversion extension recognizes the same collect modes as the
    standard Cedar Backup collect action (see Chapter 2, Basic Concepts).

    This value is the collect mode that will be used by default during the
    backup process. Individual repositories (below) may override this value. If
    all individual repositories provide their own value, then this default
    value may be omitted from configuration.

    Note: if your backup device does not suppport multisession discs, then you
    should probably use the daily collect mode to avoid losing data.

    Restrictions: Must be one of daily, weekly or incr.

compress_mode

    Default compress mode.

    Subversion repositories backups are just specially-formatted text files,
    and often compress quite well using gzip or bzip2. The compress mode
    describes how the backed-up data will be compressed, if at all.

    This value is the compress mode that will be used by default during the
    backup process. Individual repositories (below) may override this value. If
    all individual repositories provide their own value, then this default
    value may be omitted from configuration.

    Restrictions: Must be one of none, gzip or bzip2.

repository

    A Subversion repository be collected.

    This is a subsection which contains information about a specific Subversion
    repository to be backed up.

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    repository or repository directory must be configured.

    The repository subsection contains the following fields:

    collect_mode

        Collect mode for this repository.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default collect mode.

        Restrictions: Must be one of daily, weekly or incr.

    compress_mode

        Compress mode for this repository.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default compress mode.

        Restrictions: Must be one of none, gzip or bzip2.

    abs_path

        Absolute path of the Subversion repository to back up.

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

repository_dir

    A Subversion parent repository directory be collected.

    This is a subsection which contains information about a Subversion parent
    repository directory to be backed up. Any subdirectory immediately within
    this directory is assumed to be a Subversion repository, and will be backed
    up.

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    repository or repository directory must be configured.

    The repository_dir subsection contains the following fields:

    collect_mode

        Collect mode for this repository.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default collect mode.

        Restrictions: Must be one of daily, weekly or incr.

    compress_mode

        Compress mode for this repository.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default compress mode.

        Restrictions: Must be one of none, gzip or bzip2.

    abs_path

        Absolute path of the Subversion repository to back up.

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

    exclude

        List of paths or patterns to exclude from the backup.

        This is a subsection which contains a set of paths and patterns to be
        excluded within this subversion parent directory.

        This section is entirely optional, and if it exists can also be empty.

        The exclude subsection can contain one or more of each of the following
        fields:

        rel_path

            A relative path to be excluded from the backup.

            The path is assumed to be relative to the subversion parent
            directory itself. For instance, if the configured subversion parent
            directory is /opt/svn a configured relative path of software would
            exclude the path /opt/svn/software.

            This field can be repeated as many times as is necessary.

            Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

        pattern

            A pattern to be excluded from the backup.

            The pattern must be a Python regular expression. ^[21] It is
            assumed to be bounded at front and back by the beginning and end of
            the string (i.e. it is treated as if it begins with ^ and ends with
            $).

            This field can be repeated as many times as is necessary.

            Restrictions: Must be non-empty

MySQL Extension

The MySQL Extension is a Cedar Backup extension used to back up MySQL ^[26]
databases via the Cedar Backup command line. It is intended to be run either
immediately before or immediately after the standard collect action.

Note

This extension always produces a full backup. There is currently no facility
for making incremental backups. If/when someone has a need for this and can
describe how to do it, I will update this extension or provide another.

The backup is done via the mysqldump command included with the MySQL product.
Output can be compressed using gzip or bzip2. Administrators can configure the
extension either to back up all databases or to back up only specific
databases.

The extension assumes that all configured databases can be backed up by a
single user. Often, the ?root? database user will be used. An alternative is to
create a separate MySQL ?backup? user and grant that user rights to read (but
not write) various databases as needed. This second option is probably your
best choice.

Warning

The extension accepts a username and password in configuration. However, you
probably do not want to list those values in Cedar Backup configuration. This
is because Cedar Backup will provide these values to mysqldump via the
command-line --user and --password switches, which will be visible to other
users in the process listing.

Instead, you should configure the username and password in one of MySQL's
configuration files. Typically, that would be done by putting a stanza like
this in /root/.my.cnf:

[mysqldump]
user     = root
password = <secret>


Of course, if you are executing the backup as a user other than root, then you
would create the file in that user's home directory instead.

As a side note, it is also possible to configure .my.cnf such that Cedar Backup
can back up a remote database server:

[mysqldump]
host = remote.host


For this to work, you will also need to grant privileges properly for the user
which is executing the backup. See your MySQL documentation for more
information about how this can be done.

Regardless of whether you are using ~/.my.cnf or /etc/cback.conf to store
database login and password information, you should be careful about who is
allowed to view that information. Typically, this means locking down
permissions so that only the file owner can read the file contents (i.e. use
mode 0600).

To enable this extension, add the following section to the Cedar Backup
configuration file:

<extensions>
   <action>
      <name>mysql</name>
      <module>CedarBackup2.extend.mysql</module>
      <function>executeAction</function>
      <index>99</index>
   </action>
</extensions>


This extension relies on the options and collect configuration sections in the
standard Cedar Backup configuration file, and then also requires its own mysql
configuration section. This is an example MySQL configuration section:

<mysql>
   <compress_mode>bzip2</compress_mode>
   <all>Y</all>
</mysql>


If you have decided to configure login information in Cedar Backup rather than
using MySQL configuration, then you would add the username and password fields
to configuration:

<mysql>
   <user>root</user>
   <password>password</password>
   <compress_mode>bzip2</compress_mode>
   <all>Y</all>
</mysql>


The following elements are part of the MySQL configuration section:

user

    Database user.

    The database user that the backup should be executed as. Even if you list
    more than one database (below) all backups must be done as the same user.
    Typically, this would be root (i.e. the database root user, not the system
    root user).

    This value is optional. You should probably configure the username and
    password in MySQL configuration instead, as discussed above.

    Restrictions: If provided, must be non-empty.

password

    Password associated with the database user.

    This value is optional. You should probably configure the username and
    password in MySQL configuration instead, as discussed above.

    Restrictions: If provided, must be non-empty.

compress_mode

    Compress mode.

    MySQL databases dumps are just specially-formatted text files, and often
    compress quite well using gzip or bzip2. The compress mode describes how
    the backed-up data will be compressed, if at all.

    Restrictions: Must be one of none, gzip or bzip2.

all

    Indicates whether to back up all databases.

    If this value is Y, then all MySQL databases will be backed up. If this
    value is N, then one or more specific databases must be specified (see
    below).

    If you choose this option, the entire database backup will go into one big
    dump file.

    Restrictions: Must be a boolean (Y or N).

database

    Named database to be backed up.

    If you choose to specify individual databases rather than all databases,
    then each database will be backed up into its own dump file.

    This field can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    database must be configured if the all option (above) is set to N. You may
    not configure any individual databases if the all option is set to Y.

    Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

PostgreSQL Extension

Community-contributed Extension

This is a community-contributed extension provided by Antoine Beaupre ("The
Anarcat"). I have added regression tests around the configuration parsing code
and I will maintain this section in the user manual based on his source code
documentation.

Unfortunately, I don't have any PostgreSQL databases with which to test the
functional code. While I have code-reviewed the code and it looks both sensible
and safe, I have to rely on the author to ensure that it works properly.

The PostgreSQL Extension is a Cedar Backup extension used to back up PostgreSQL
^[27] databases via the Cedar Backup command line. It is intended to be run
either immediately before or immediately after the standard collect action.

The backup is done via the pg_dump or pg_dumpall commands included with the
PostgreSQL product. Output can be compressed using gzip or bzip2.
Administrators can configure the extension either to back up all databases or
to back up only specific databases.

The extension assumes that the current user has passwordless access to the
database since there is no easy way to pass a password to the pg_dump client.
This can be accomplished using appropriate configuration in the pg_hda.conf
file.

This extension always produces a full backup. There is currently no facility
for making incremental backups.

Warning

Once you place PostgreSQL configuration into the Cedar Backup configuration
file, you should be careful about who is allowed to see that information. This
is because PostgreSQL configuration will contain information about available
PostgreSQL databases and usernames. Typically, you might want to lock down
permissions so that only the file owner can read the file contents (i.e. use
mode 0600).

To enable this extension, add the following section to the Cedar Backup
configuration file:

<extensions>
   <action>
      <name>postgresql</name>
      <module>CedarBackup2.extend.postgresql</module>
      <function>executeAction</function>
      <index>99</index>
   </action>
</extensions>


This extension relies on the options and collect configuration sections in the
standard Cedar Backup configuration file, and then also requires its own
postgresql configuration section. This is an example PostgreSQL configuration
section:

<postgresql>
   <compress_mode>bzip2</compress_mode>
   <user>username</user>
   <all>Y</all>
</postgresql>


If you decide to back up specific databases, then you would list them
individually, like this:

<postgresql>
   <compress_mode>bzip2</compress_mode>
   <user>username</user>
   <all>N</all>
   <database>db1</database>
   <database>db2</database>
</postgresql>


The following elements are part of the PostgreSQL configuration section:

user

    Database user.

    The database user that the backup should be executed as. Even if you list
    more than one database (below) all backups must be done as the same user.

    This value is optional.

    Consult your PostgreSQL documentation for information on how to configure a
    default database user outside of Cedar Backup, and for information on how
    to specify a database password when you configure a user within Cedar
    Backup. You will probably want to modify pg_hda.conf.

    Restrictions: If provided, must be non-empty.

compress_mode

    Compress mode.

    PostgreSQL databases dumps are just specially-formatted text files, and
    often compress quite well using gzip or bzip2. The compress mode describes
    how the backed-up data will be compressed, if at all.

    Restrictions: Must be one of none, gzip or bzip2.

all

    Indicates whether to back up all databases.

    If this value is Y, then all PostgreSQL databases will be backed up. If
    this value is N, then one or more specific databases must be specified (see
    below).

    If you choose this option, the entire database backup will go into one big
    dump file.

    Restrictions: Must be a boolean (Y or N).

database

    Named database to be backed up.

    If you choose to specify individual databases rather than all databases,
    then each database will be backed up into its own dump file.

    This field can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    database must be configured if the all option (above) is set to N. You may
    not configure any individual databases if the all option is set to Y.

    Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

Mbox Extension

The Mbox Extension is a Cedar Backup extension used to incrementally back up
UNIX-style ?mbox? mail folders via the Cedar Backup command line. It is
intended to be run either immediately before or immediately after the standard
collect action.

Mbox mail folders are not well-suited to being backed up by the normal Cedar
Backup incremental backup process. This is because active folders are typically
appended to on a daily basis. This forces the incremental backup process to
back them up every day in order to avoid losing data. This can result in quite
a bit of wasted space when backing up large mail folders.

What the mbox extension does is leverage the grepmail utility to back up only
email messages which have been received since the last incremental backup. This
way, even if a folder is added to every day, only the recently-added messages
are backed up. This can potentially save a lot of space.

Each configured mbox file or directory can be backed using the same collect
modes allowed for filesystems in the standard Cedar Backup collect action
(weekly, daily, incremental) and the output can be compressed using either gzip
or bzip2.

To enable this extension, add the following section to the Cedar Backup
configuration file:

<extensions>
   <action>
      <name>mbox</name>
      <module>CedarBackup2.extend.mbox</module>
      <function>executeAction</function>
      <index>99</index>
   </action>
</extensions>


This extension relies on the options and collect configuration sections in the
standard Cedar Backup configuration file, and then also requires its own mbox
configuration section. This is an example mbox configuration section:

<mbox>
   <collect_mode>incr</collect_mode>
   <compress_mode>gzip</compress_mode>
   <file>
      <abs_path>/home/user1/mail/greylist</abs_path>
      <collect_mode>daily</collect_mode>
   </file>
   <dir>
      <abs_path>/home/user2/mail</abs_path>
   </dir>
   <dir>
      <abs_path>/home/user3/mail</abs_path>
      <exclude>
         <rel_path>spam</rel_path>
         <pattern>.*debian.*</pattern>
      </exclude>
   </dir>
</mbox>


Configuration is much like the standard collect action. Differences come from
the fact that mbox directories are not collected recursively.

Unlike collect configuration, exclusion information can only be configured at
the mbox directory level (there are no global exclusions). Another difference
is that no absolute exclusion paths are allowed ? only relative path exclusions
and patterns.

The following elements are part of the mbox configuration section:

collect_mode

    Default collect mode.

    The collect mode describes how frequently an mbox file or directory is
    backed up. The mbox extension recognizes the same collect modes as the
    standard Cedar Backup collect action (see Chapter 2, Basic Concepts).

    This value is the collect mode that will be used by default during the
    backup process. Individual files or directories (below) may override this
    value. If all individual files or directories provide their own value, then
    this default value may be omitted from configuration.

    Note: if your backup device does not suppport multisession discs, then you
    should probably use the daily collect mode to avoid losing data.

    Restrictions: Must be one of daily, weekly or incr.

compress_mode

    Default compress mode.

    Mbox file or directory backups are just text, and often compress quite well
    using gzip or bzip2. The compress mode describes how the backed-up data
    will be compressed, if at all.

    This value is the compress mode that will be used by default during the
    backup process. Individual files or directories (below) may override this
    value. If all individual files or directories provide their own value, then
    this default value may be omitted from configuration.

    Restrictions: Must be one of none, gzip or bzip2.

file

    An individual mbox file to be collected.

    This is a subsection which contains information about an individual mbox
    file to be backed up.

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    mbox file or directory must be configured.

    The file subsection contains the following fields:

    collect_mode

        Collect mode for this file.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default collect mode.

        Restrictions: Must be one of daily, weekly or incr.

    compress_mode

        Compress mode for this file.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default compress mode.

        Restrictions: Must be one of none, gzip or bzip2.

    abs_path

        Absolute path of the mbox file to back up.

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

dir

    An mbox directory to be collected.

    This is a subsection which contains information about an mbox directory to
    be backed up. An mbox directory is a directory containing mbox files. Every
    file in an mbox directory is assumed to be an mbox file. Mbox directories
    are not collected recursively. Only the files immediately within the
    configured directory will be backed-up and any subdirectories will be
    ignored.

    This section can be repeated as many times as is necessary. At least one
    mbox file or directory must be configured.

    The dir subsection contains the following fields:

    collect_mode

        Collect mode for this file.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default collect mode.

        Restrictions: Must be one of daily, weekly or incr.

    compress_mode

        Compress mode for this file.

        This field is optional. If it doesn't exist, the backup will use the
        default compress mode.

        Restrictions: Must be one of none, gzip or bzip2.

    abs_path

        Absolute path of the mbox directory to back up.

        Restrictions: Must be an absolute path.

    exclude

        List of paths or patterns to exclude from the backup.

        This is a subsection which contains a set of paths and patterns to be
        excluded within this mbox directory.

        This section is entirely optional, and if it exists can also be empty.

        The exclude subsection can contain one or more of each of the following
        fields:

        rel_path

            A relative path to be excluded from the backup.

            The path is assumed to be relative to the mbox directory itself.
            For instance, if the configured mbox directory is /home/user2/mail
            a configured relative path of SPAM would exclude the path /home/
            user2/mail/SPAM.

            This field can be repeated as many times as is necessary.

            Restrictions: Must be non-empty.

        pattern

            A pattern to be excluded from the backup.

            The pattern must be a Python regular expression. ^[21] It is
            assumed to be bounded at front and back by the beginning and end of
            the string (i.e. it is treated as if it begins with ^ and ends with
            $).

            This field can be repeated as many times as is necessary.

            Restrictions: Must be non-empty

Encrypt Extension

The Encrypt Extension is a Cedar Backup extension used to encrypt backups. It
does this by encrypting the contents of a master's staging directory each day
after the stage action is run. This way, backed-up data is encrypted both when
sitting on the master and when written to disc. This extension must be run
before the standard store action, otherwise unencrypted data will be written to
disc.

There are several differents ways encryption could have been built in to or
layered on to Cedar Backup. I asked the mailing list for opinions on the
subject in January 2007 and did not get a lot of feedback, so I chose the
option that was simplest to understand and simplest to implement. If other
encryption use cases make themselves known in the future, this extension can be
enhanced or replaced.

Currently, this extension supports only GPG. However, it would be
straightforward to support other public-key encryption mechanisms, such as
OpenSSL.

Warning

If you decide to encrypt your backups, be absolutely sure that you have your
GPG secret key saved off someplace safe ? someplace other than on your backup
disc. If you lose your secret key, your backup will be useless.

I suggest that before you rely on this extension, you should execute a dry run
and make sure you can successfully decrypt the backup that is written to disc.

Before configuring the Encrypt extension, you must configure GPG. Either create
a new keypair or use an existing one. Determine which user will execute your
backup (typically root) and have that user import and lsign the public half of
the keypair. Then, save off the secret half of the keypair someplace safe,
apart from your backup (i.e. on a floppy disk or USB drive). Make sure you know
the recipient name associated with the public key because you'll need it to
configure Cedar Backup. (If you can run gpg -e -r "Recipient Name" file.txt and
it executes cleanly with no user interaction required, you should be OK.)

An encrypted backup has the same file structure as a normal backup, so all of
the instructions in Appendix C, Data Recovery apply. The only difference is
that encrypted files will have an additional .gpg extension (so for instance
file.tar.gz becomes file.tar.gz.gpg). To recover decrypted data, simply log on
as a user which has access to the secret key and decrypt the .gpg file that you
are interested in. Then, recover the data as usual.

Note: I am being intentionally vague about how to configure and use GPG,
because I do not want to encourage neophytes to blindly use this extension. If
you do not already understand GPG well enough to follow the two paragraphs
above, do not use this extension. Instead, before encrypting your backups,
check out the excellent GNU Privacy Handbook at http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/
manual.html and gain an understanding of how encryption can help you or hurt
you.

To enable this extension, add the following section to the Cedar Backup
configuration file:

<extensions>
   <action>
      <name>encrypt</name>
      <module>CedarBackup2.extend.encrypt</module>
      <function>executeAction</function>
      <index>301</index>
   </action>
</extensions>


This extension relies on the options and staging configuration sections in the
standard Cedar Backup configuration file, and then also requires its own
encrypt configuration section. This is an example Encrypt configuration
section:

<encrypt>
   <encrypt_mode>gpg</encrypt_mode>
   <encrypt_target>Backup User</encrypt_target>
</encrypt>


The following elements are part of the Encrypt configuration section:

encrypt_mode

    Encryption mode.

    This value specifies which encryption mechanism will be used by the
    extension.

    Currently, only the GPG public-key encryption mechanism is supported.

    Restrictions: Must be gpg.

encrypt_target

    Encryption target.

    The value in this field is dependent on the encryption mode. For the gpg
    mode, this is the name of the recipient whose public key will be used to
    encrypt the backup data, i.e. the value accepted by gpg -r.

Split Extension

The Split Extension is a Cedar Backup extension used to split up large files
within staging directories. It is probably only useful in combination with the 
cback-span command, which requires individual files within staging directories
to each be smaller than a single disc.

You would normally run this action immediately after the standard stage action,
but you could also choose to run it by hand immediately before running 
cback-span.

The split extension uses the standard UNIX split tool to split the large files
up. This tool simply splits the files on bite-size boundaries. It has no
knowledge of file formats.

Note: this means that in order to recover the data in your original large file,
you must have every file that the original file was split into. Think carefully
about whether this is what you want. It doesn't sound like a huge limitation.
However, cback-span might put an indivdual file on any disc in a set ? the
files split from one larger file will not necessarily be together. That means
you will probably need every disc in your backup set in order to recover any
data from the backup set.

To enable this extension, add the following section to the Cedar Backup
configuration file:

<extensions>
   <action>
      <name>split</name>
      <module>CedarBackup2.extend.split</module>
      <function>executeAction</function>
      <index>299</index>
   </action>
</extensions>


This extension relies on the options and staging configuration sections in the
standard Cedar Backup configuration file, and then also requires its own split
configuration section. This is an example Split configuration section:

<split>
   <size_limit>250 MB</size_limit>
   <split_size>100 MB</split_size>
</split>


The following elements are part of the Split configuration section:

size_limit

    Size limit.

    Files with a size strictly larger than this limit will be split by the
    extension.

    You can enter this value in two different forms. It can either be a simple
    number, in which case the value is assumed to be in bytes; or it can be a
    number followed by a unit (KB, MB, GB).

    Valid examples are ?10240?, ?250 MB? or ?1.1 GB?.

    Restrictions: Must be a size as described above.

split_size

    Split size.

    This is the size of the chunks that a large file will be split into. The
    final chunk may be smaller if the split size doesn't divide evenly into the
    file size.

    You can enter this value in two different forms. It can either be a simple
    number, in which case the value is assumed to be in bytes; or it can be a
    number followed by a unit (KB, MB, GB).

    Valid examples are ?10240?, ?250 MB? or ?1.1 GB?.

    Restrictions: Must be a size as described above.

Capacity Extension

The capacity extension checks the current capacity of the media in the writer
and prints a warning if the media exceeds an indicated capacity. The capacity
is indicated either by a maximum percentage utilized or by a minimum number of
bytes that must remain unused.

This action can be run at any time, but is probably best run as the last action
on any given day, so you get as much notice as possible that your media is full
and needs to be replaced.

To enable this extension, add the following section to the Cedar Backup
configuration file:

<extensions> <action>
      <name>capacity</name>
      <module>CedarBackup2.extend.capacity</module>
      <function>executeAction</function>
      <index>299</index>
   </action>
</extensions>


This extension relies on the options and store configuration sections in the
standard Cedar Backup configuration file, and then also requires its own
capacity configuration section. This is an example Capacity configuration
section that configures the extension to warn if the media is more than 95.5%
full:

<capacity>
   <max_percentage>95.5</max_percentage>
</capacity>


This example configures the extension to warn if the media has fewer than 16 MB
free:

<capacity>
   <min_bytes>16 MB</min_bytes>
</capacity>


The following elements are part of the Capacity configuration section:

max_percentage

    Maximum percentage of the media that may be utilized.

    You must provide either this value or the min_bytes value.

    Restrictions: Must be a floating point number between 0.0 and 100.0

min_bytes

    Minimum number of free bytes that must be available.

    You can enter this value in two different forms. It can either be a simple
    number, in which case the value is assumed to be in bytes; or it can be a
    number followed by a unit (KB, MB, GB).

    Valid examples are ?10240?, ?250 MB? or ?1.1 GB?.

    You must provide either this value or the max_percentage value.

    Restrictions: Must be a byte quantity as described above.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

^[25] See http://subversion.org

^[26] See http://www.mysql.com

^[27] See http://www.postgresql.org/

Appendix A. Extension Architecture Interface

The Cedar Backup Extension Architecture Interface is the application
programming interface used by third-party developers to write Cedar Backup
extensions. This appendix briefly specifies the interface in enough detail for
someone to succesfully implement an extension.

You will recall that Cedar Backup extensions are third-party pieces of code
which extend Cedar Backup's functionality. Extensions can be invoked from the
Cedar Backup command line and are allowed to place their configuration in Cedar
Backup's configuration file.

There is a one-to-one mapping between a command-line extended action and an
extension function. The mapping is configured in the Cedar Backup configuration
file using a section something like this:

<extensions>
   <action>
      <name>database</name>
      <module>foo</module>
      <function>bar</function>
      <index>101</index>
   </action>
</extensions>


In this case, the action ?database? has been mapped to the extension function
foo.bar().

Extension functions can take any actions they would like to once they have been
invoked, but must abide by these rules:

 1. Extensions may not write to stdout or stderr using functions such as print
    or sys.write.

 2. All logging must take place using the Python logging facility.
    Flow-of-control logging should happen on the CedarBackup2.log topic.
    Authors can assume that ERROR will always go to the terminal, that INFO and
    WARN will always be logged, and that DEBUG will be ignored unless debugging
    is enabled.

 3. Any time an extension invokes a command-line utility, it must be done
    through the CedarBackup2.util.executeCommand function. This will help keep
    Cedar Backup safer from format-string attacks, and will make it easier to
    consistently log command-line process output.

 4. Extensions may not return any value.

 5. Extensions must throw a Python exception containing a descriptive message
    if processing fails. Extension authors can use their judgement as to what
    constitutes failure; however, any problems during execution should result
    in either a thrown exception or a logged message.

 6. Extensions may rely only on Cedar Backup functionality that is advertised
    as being part of the public interface. This means that extensions cannot
    directly make use of methods, functions or values starting with with the _
    character. Furthermore, extensions should only rely on parts of the public
    interface that are documented in the online Epydoc documentation.

 7. Extension authors are encouraged to extend the Cedar Backup public
    interface through normal methods of inheritence. However, no extension is
    allowed to directly change Cedar Backup code in a way that would affect how
    Cedar Backup itself executes when the extension has not been invoked. For
    instance, extensions would not be allowed to add new command-line options
    or new writer types.

 8. Extensions must be written to assume an empty locale set (no $LC_*
    settings) and $LANG=C. For the typical open-source software project, this
    would imply writing output-parsing code against the English localization
    (if any). The executeCommand function does sanitize the environment to
    enforce this configuration.

Extension functions take three arguments: the path to configuration on disk, a
CedarBackup2.cli.Options object representing the command-line options in
effect, and a CedarBackup2.config.Config object representing parsed standard
configuration.

def function(configPath, options, config):
   """Sample extension function."""
   pass


This interface is structured so that simple extensions can use standard
configuration without having to parse it for themselves, but more complicated
extensions can get at the configuration file on disk and parse it again as
needed.

The interface to the CedarBackup2.cli.Options and CedarBackup2.config.Config
classes has been thoroughly documented using Epydoc, and the documentation is
available on the Cedar Backup website. The interface is guaranteed to change
only in backwards-compatible ways unless the Cedar Backup major version number
is bumped (i.e. from 2 to 3).

If an extension needs to add its own configuration information to the Cedar
Backup configuration file, this extra configuration must be added in a new
configuration section using a name that does not conflict with standard
configuration or other known extensions.

For instance, our hypothetical database extension might require configuration
indicating the path to some repositories to back up. This information might go
into a section something like this:

<database>
   <repository>/path/to/repo1</repository>
   <repository>/path/to/repo2</repository>
</database>


In order to read this new configuration, the extension code can either inherit
from the Config object and create a subclass that knows how to parse the new
database config section, or can write its own code to parse whatever it needs
out of the file. Either way, the resulting code is completely independent of
the standard Cedar Backup functionality.

Appendix B. Dependencies

Python 2.7

    Cedar Backup is written in Python 2 and requires version 2.7 or greater of
    the language. Python 2.7 was originally released on 4 Jul 2010, and is the
    last supported release of Python 2. As of this writing, all current Linux
    and BSD distributions include it.

    +------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Source |                           URL                           |
    |--------+---------------------------------------------------------|
    |upstream|http://www.python.org                                    |
    |--------+---------------------------------------------------------|
    |Debian  |http://packages.debian.org/stable/python/python2.7       |
    |--------+---------------------------------------------------------|
    |RPM     |http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=python|
    +------------------------------------------------------------------+

    If you can't find a package for your system, install from the package
    source, using the ?upstream? link.

RSH Server and Client

    Although Cedar Backup will technically work with any RSH-compatible server
    and client pair (such as the classic ?rsh? client), most users should only
    use an SSH (secure shell) server and client.

    The defacto standard today is OpenSSH. Some systems package the server and
    the client together, and others package the server and the client
    separately. Note that master nodes need an SSH client, and client nodes
    need to run an SSH server.

    +-------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Source |                           URL                            |
    |--------+----------------------------------------------------------|
    |upstream|http://www.openssh.com/                                   |
    |--------+----------------------------------------------------------|
    |Debian  |http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/ssh                 |
    |--------+----------------------------------------------------------|
    |RPM     |http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=openssh|
    +-------------------------------------------------------------------+

    If you can't find SSH client or server packages for your system, install
    from the package source, using the ?upstream? link.

mkisofs

    The mkisofs command is used create ISO filesystem images that can later be
    written to backup media.

    On Debian platforms, mkisofs is not distributed and genisoimage is used
    instead. The Debian package takes care of this for you.

    +-------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Source |                           URL                            |
    |--------+----------------------------------------------------------|
    |upstream|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrtools                    |
    |--------+----------------------------------------------------------|
    |RPM     |http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=mkisofs|
    +-------------------------------------------------------------------+

    If you can't find a package for your system, install from the package
    source, using the ?upstream? link.

cdrecord

    The cdrecord command is used to write ISO images to CD media in a backup
    device.

    On Debian platforms, cdrecord is not distributed and wodim is used instead.
    The Debian package takes care of this for you.

    +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Source |                            URL                            |
    |--------+-----------------------------------------------------------|
    |upstream|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrtools                     |
    |--------+-----------------------------------------------------------|
    |RPM     |http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=cdrecord|
    +--------------------------------------------------------------------+

    If you can't find a package for your system, install from the package
    source, using the ?upstream? link.

dvd+rw-tools

    The dvd+rw-tools package provides the growisofs utility, which is used to
    write ISO images to DVD media in a backup device.

    +------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Source |                              URL                              |
    |--------+---------------------------------------------------------------|
    |upstream|http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/                     |
    |--------+---------------------------------------------------------------|
    |Debian  |http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/dvd+rw-tools           |
    |--------+---------------------------------------------------------------|
    |RPM     |http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=dvd+rw-tools|
    +------------------------------------------------------------------------+

    If you can't find a package for your system, install from the package
    source, using the ?upstream? link.

eject and volname

    The eject command is used to open and close the tray on a backup device (if
    the backup device has a tray). Sometimes, the tray must be opened and
    closed in order to "reset" the device so it notices recent changes to a
    disc.

    The volname command is used to determine the volume name of media in a
    backup device.

    +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Source |                          URL                           |
    |--------+--------------------------------------------------------|
    |upstream|http://sourceforge.net/projects/eject                   |
    |--------+--------------------------------------------------------|
    |Debian  |http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/eject           |
    |--------+--------------------------------------------------------|
    |RPM     |http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=eject|
    +-----------------------------------------------------------------+

    If you can't find a package for your system, install from the package
    source, using the ?upstream? link.

mount and umount

    The mount and umount commands are used to mount and unmount CD/DVD media
    after it has been written, in order to run a consistency check.

    +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Source |                          URL                           |
    |--------+--------------------------------------------------------|
    |upstream|https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/      |
    |--------+--------------------------------------------------------|
    |Debian  |http://packages.debian.org/stable/base/mount            |
    |--------+--------------------------------------------------------|
    |RPM     |http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=mount|
    +-----------------------------------------------------------------+

    If you can't find a package for your system, install from the package
    source, using the ?upstream? link.

grepmail

    The grepmail command is used by the mbox extension to pull out only recent
    messages from mbox mail folders.

    +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Source |                            URL                            |
    |--------+-----------------------------------------------------------|
    |upstream|http://sourceforge.net/projects/grepmail/                  |
    |--------+-----------------------------------------------------------|
    |Debian  |http://packages.debian.org/stable/mail/grepmail            |
    |--------+-----------------------------------------------------------|
    |RPM     |http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=grepmail|
    +--------------------------------------------------------------------+

    If you can't find a package for your system, install from the package
    source, using the ?upstream? link.

gpg

    The gpg command is used by the encrypt extension to encrypt files.

    +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Source |                          URL                           |
    |--------+--------------------------------------------------------|
    |upstream|https://www.gnupg.org/                                  |
    |--------+--------------------------------------------------------|
    |Debian  |http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/gnupg           |
    |--------+--------------------------------------------------------|
    |RPM     |http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=gnupg|
    +-----------------------------------------------------------------+

    If you can't find a package for your system, install from the package
    source, using the ?upstream? link.

split

    The split command is used by the split extension to split up large files.

    This command is typically part of the core operating system install and is
    not distributed in a separate package.

AWS CLI

    AWS CLI is Amazon's official command-line tool for interacting with the
    Amazon Web Services infrastruture. Cedar Backup uses AWS CLI to copy backup
    data up to Amazon S3 cloud storage.

    After you install AWS CLI, you need to configure your connection to AWS
    with an appropriate access id and access key. Amazon provides a good setup
    guide.

    +--------------------------------------------------+
    | Source |                   URL                   |
    |--------+-----------------------------------------|
    |upstream|http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/cli/ |
    |--------+-----------------------------------------|
    |Debian  |https://packages.debian.org/stable/awscli|
    +--------------------------------------------------+

    The initial implementation of the amazons3 extension was written using AWS
    CLI 1.4. As of this writing, not all Linux distributions include a package
    for this version. On these platforms, the easiest way to install it is via
    PIP: apt-get install python-pip, and then pip install awscli. The Debian
    package includes an appropriate dependency starting with the jessie
    release.

Chardet

    The cback-amazons3-sync command relies on the Chardet python package to
    check filename encoding. You only need this package if you are going to use
    the sync tool.

    +----------------------------------------------------------+
    | Source |                       URL                       |
    |--------+-------------------------------------------------|
    |upstream|https://github.com/chardet/chardet               |
    |--------+-------------------------------------------------|
    |debian  |https://packages.debian.org/stable/python-chardet|
    +----------------------------------------------------------+

Appendix C. Data Recovery

Table of Contents

Finding your Data
Recovering Filesystem Data

    Full Restore
    Partial Restore

Recovering MySQL Data
Recovering Subversion Data
Recovering Mailbox Data
Recovering Data split by the Split Extension

Finding your Data

The first step in data recovery is finding the data that you want to recover.
You need to decide whether you are going to to restore off backup media, or out
of some existing staging data that has not yet been purged. The only difference
is, if you purge staging data less frequently than once per week, you might
have some data available in the staging directories which would not be found on
your backup media, depending on how you rotate your media. (And of course, if
your system is trashed or stolen, you probably will not have access to your old
staging data in any case.)

Regardless of the data source you choose, you will find the data organized in
the same way. The remainder of these examples will work off an example backup
disc, but the contents of the staging directory will look pretty much like the
contents of the disc, with data organized first by date and then by backup peer
name.

This is the root directory of my example disc:

root:/mnt/cdrw# ls -l
total 4
drwxr-x---  3 backup backup 4096 Sep 01 06:30 2005/


In this root directory is one subdirectory for each year represented in the
backup. In this example, the backup represents data entirely from the year
2005. If your configured backup week happens to span a year boundary, there
would be two subdirectories here (for example, one for 2005 and one for 2006).

Within each year directory is one subdirectory for each month represented in
the backup.

root:/mnt/cdrw/2005# ls -l
total 2
dr-xr-xr-x  6 root root 2048 Sep 11 05:30 09/


In this example, the backup represents data entirely from the month of
September, 2005. If your configured backup week happens to span a month
boundary, there would be two subdirectories here (for example, one for August
2005 and one for September 2005).

Within each month directory is one subdirectory for each day represented in the
backup.

root:/mnt/cdrw/2005/09# ls -l
total 8
dr-xr-xr-x  5 root root 2048 Sep  7 05:30 07/
dr-xr-xr-x  5 root root 2048 Sep  8 05:30 08/
dr-xr-xr-x  5 root root 2048 Sep  9 05:30 09/
dr-xr-xr-x  5 root root 2048 Sep 11 05:30 11/


Depending on how far into the week your backup media is from, you might have as
few as one daily directory in here, or as many as seven.

Within each daily directory is a stage indicator (indicating when the directory
was staged) and one directory for each peer configured in the backup:

root:/mnt/cdrw/2005/09/07# ls -l
total 10
dr-xr-xr-x  2 root root 2048 Sep  7 02:31 host1/
-r--r--r--  1 root root    0 Sep  7 03:27 cback.stage
dr-xr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Sep  7 02:30 host2/
dr-xr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Sep  7 03:23 host3/


In this case, you can see that my backup includes three machines, and that the
backup data was staged on September 7, 2005 at 03:27.

Within the directory for a given host are all of the files collected on that
host. This might just include tarfiles from a normal Cedar Backup collect run,
and might also include files ?collected? from Cedar Backup extensions or by
other third-party processes on your system.

root:/mnt/cdrw/2005/09/07/host1# ls -l
total 157976
-r--r--r--  1 root root 11206159 Sep  7 02:30 boot.tar.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root        0 Sep  7 02:30 cback.collect
-r--r--r--  1 root root     3199 Sep  7 02:30 dpkg-selections.txt.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root   908325 Sep  7 02:30 etc.tar.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root      389 Sep  7 02:30 fdisk-l.txt.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root  1003100 Sep  7 02:30 ls-laR.txt.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root    19800 Sep  7 02:30 mysqldump.txt.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root  4133372 Sep  7 02:30 opt-local.tar.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root 44794124 Sep  8 23:34 opt-public.tar.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root 30028057 Sep  7 02:30 root.tar.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root  4747070 Sep  7 02:30 svndump-0:782-opt-svn-repo1.txt.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root   603863 Sep  7 02:30 svndump-0:136-opt-svn-repo2.txt.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root   113484 Sep  7 02:30 var-lib-jspwiki.tar.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root 19556660 Sep  7 02:30 var-log.tar.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 root root 14753855 Sep  7 02:30 var-mail.tar.bz2


As you can see, I back up variety of different things on host1. I run the
normal collect action, as well as the sysinfo, mysql and subversion extensions.
The resulting backup files are named in a way that makes it easy to determine
what they represent.

Files of the form *.tar.bz2 represent directories backed up by the collect
action. The first part of the name (before ?.tar.bz2?), represents the path to
the directory. For example, boot.tar.gz contains data from /boot, and
var-lib-jspwiki.tar.bz2 contains data from /var/lib/jspwiki.

The fdisk-l.txt.bz2, ls-laR.tar.bz2 and dpkg-selections.tar.bz2 files are
produced by the sysinfo extension.

The mysqldump.txt.bz2 file is produced by the mysql extension. It represents a
system-wide database dump, because I use the ?all? flag in configuration. If I
were to configure Cedar Backup to dump individual datbases, then the filename
would contain the database name (something like mysqldump-bugs.txt.bz2).

Finally, the files of the form svndump-*.txt.bz2 are produced by the subversion
extension. There is one dump file for each configured repository, and the dump
file name represents the name of the repository and the revisions in that dump.
So, the file svndump-0:782-opt-svn-repo1.txt.bz2 represents revisions 0-782 of
the repository at /opt/svn/repo1. You can tell that this file contains a full
backup of the repository to this point, because the starting revision is zero.
Later incremental backups would have a non-zero starting revision, i.e. perhaps
783-785, followed by 786-800, etc.

Recovering Filesystem Data

Filesystem data is gathered by the standard Cedar Backup collect action. This
data is placed into files of the form *.tar. The first part of the name (before
?.tar?), represents the path to the directory. For example, boot.tar would
contain data from /boot, and var-lib-jspwiki.tar would contain data from /var/
lib/jspwiki. (As a special case, data from the root directory would be placed
in -.tar). Remember that your tarfile might have a bzip2 (.bz2) or gzip (.gz)
extension, depending on what compression you specified in configuration.

If you are using full backups every day, the latest backup data is always
within the latest daily directory stored on your backup media or within your
staging directory. If you have some or all of your directories configured to do
incremental backups, then the first day of the week holds the full backups and
the other days represent incremental differences relative to that first day of
the week.

Where to extract your backup

If you are restoring a home directory or some other non-system directory as
part of a full restore, it is probably fine to extract the backup directly into
the filesystem.

If you are restoring a system directory like /etc as part of a full restore,
extracting directly into the filesystem is likely to break things, especially
if you re-installed a newer version of your operating system than the one you
originally backed up. It's better to extract directories like this to a
temporary location and pick out only the files you find you need.

When doing a partial restore, I suggest always extracting to a temporary
location. Doing it this way gives you more control over what you restore, and
helps you avoid compounding your original problem with another one (like
overwriting the wrong file, oops).

Full Restore

To do a full system restore, find the newest applicable full backup and extract
it. If you have some incremental backups, extract them into the same place as
the full backup, one by one starting from oldest to newest. (This way, if a
file changed every day you will always get the latest one.)

All of the backed-up files are stored in the tar file in a relative fashion, so
you can extract from the tar file either directly into the filesystem, or into
a temporary location.

For example, to restore boot.tar.bz2 directly into /boot, execute tar from your
root directory (/):

root:/# bzcat boot.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -


Of course, use zcat or just cat, depending on what kind of compression is in
use.

If you want to extract boot.tar.gz into a temporary location like /tmp/boot
instead, just change directories first. In this case, you'd execute the tar
command from within /tmp instead of /.

root:/tmp# bzcat boot.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -


Again, use zcat or just cat as appropriate.

For more information, you might want to check out the manpage or GNU info
documentation for the tar command.

Partial Restore

Most users will need to do a partial restore much more frequently than a full
restore. Perhaps you accidentally removed your home directory, or forgot to
check in some version of a file before deleting it. Or, perhaps the person who
packaged Apache for your system blew away your web server configuration on
upgrade (it happens). The solution to these and other kinds of problems is a
partial restore (assuming you've backed up the proper things).

The procedure is similar to a full restore. The specific steps depend on how
much information you have about the file you are looking for. Where with a full
restore, you can confidently extract the full backup followed by each of the
incremental backups, this might not be what you want when doing a partial
restore. You may need to take more care in finding the right version of a file
? since the same file, if changed frequently, would appear in more than one
backup.

Start by finding the backup media that contains the file you are looking for.
If you rotate your backup media, and your last known ?contact? with the file
was a while ago, you may need to look on older media to find it. This may take
some effort if you are not sure when the change you are trying to correct took
place.

Once you have decided to look at a particular piece of backup media, find the
correct peer (host), and look for the file in the full backup:

root:/tmp# bzcat boot.tar.bz2 | tar tvf - path/to/file


Of course, use zcat or just cat, depending on what kind of compression is in
use.

The tvf tells tar to search for the file in question and just list the results
rather than extracting the file. Note that the filename is relative (with no
starting /). Alternately, you can omit the path/to/file and search through the
output using more or less

If you haven't found what you are looking for, work your way through the
incremental files for the directory in question. One of them may also have the
file if it changed during the course of the backup. Or, move to older or newer
media and see if you can find the file there.

Once you have found your file, extract it using xvf:

root:/tmp# bzcat boot.tar.bz2 | tar xvf - path/to/file


Again, use zcat or just cat as appropriate.

Inspect the file and make sure it's what you're looking for. Again, you may
need to move to older or newer media to find the exact version of your file.

For more information, you might want to check out the manpage or GNU info
documentation for the tar command.

Recovering MySQL Data

MySQL data is gathered by the Cedar Backup mysql extension. This extension
always creates a full backup each time it runs. This wastes some space, but
makes it easy to restore database data. The following procedure describes how
to restore your MySQL database from the backup.

Warning

I am not a MySQL expert. I am providing this information for reference. I have
tested these procedures on my own MySQL installation; however, I only have a
single database for use by Bugzilla, and I may have misunderstood something
with regard to restoring individual databases as a user other than root. If you
have any doubts, test the procedure below before relying on it!

MySQL experts and/or knowledgable Cedar Backup users: feel free to write me and
correct any part of this procedure.

First, find the backup you are interested in. If you have specified ?all
databases? in configuration, you will have a single backup file, called
mysqldump.txt. If you have specified individual databases in configuration,
then you will have files with names like mysqldump-database.txt instead. In
either case, your file might have a .gz or .bz2 extension depending on what
kind of compression you specified in configuration.

If you are restoring an ?all databases? backup, make sure that you have
correctly created the root user and know its password. Then, execute:

daystrom:/# bzcat mysqldump.txt.bz2 | mysql -p -u root


Of course, use zcat or just cat, depending on what kind of compression is in
use.

Because the database backup includes CREATE DATABASE SQL statements, this
command should take care of creating all of the databases within the backup, as
well as populating them.

If you are restoring a backup for a specific database, you have two choices. If
you have a root login, you can use the same command as above:

daystrom:/# bzcat mysqldump-database.txt.bz2 | mysql -p -u root


Otherwise, you can create the database and its login first (or have someone
create it) and then use a database-specific login to execute the restore:

daystrom:/# bzcat mysqldump-database.txt.bz2 | mysql -p -u user database


Again, use zcat or just cat as appropriate.

For more information on using MySQL, see the documentation on the MySQL web
site, http://mysql.org/, or the manpages for the mysql and mysqldump commands.

Recovering Subversion Data

Subversion data is gathered by the Cedar Backup subversion extension. Cedar
Backup will create either full or incremental backups, but the procedure for
restoring is the same for both. Subversion backups are always taken on a
per-repository basis. If you need to restore more than one repository, follow
the procedures below for each repository you are interested in.

First, find the backup or backups you are interested in. Typically, you will
need the full backup from the first day of the week and each incremental backup
from the other days of the week.

The subversion extension creates files of the form svndump-*.txt. These files
might have a .gz or .bz2 extension depending on what kind of compression you
specified in configuration. There is one dump file for each configured
repository, and the dump file name represents the name of the repository and
the revisions in that dump. So, the file svndump-0:782-opt-svn-repo1.txt.bz2
represents revisions 0-782 of the repository at /opt/svn/repo1. You can tell
that this file contains a full backup of the repository to this point, because
the starting revision is zero. Later incremental backups would have a non-zero
starting revision, i.e. perhaps 783-785, followed by 786-800, etc.

Next, if you still have the old Subversion repository around, you might want to
just move it off (rename the top-level directory) before executing the restore.
Or, you can restore into a temporary directory and rename it later to its real
name once you've checked it out. That is what my example below will show.

Next, you need to create a new Subversion repository to hold the restored data.
This example shows an FSFS repository, but that is an arbitrary choice. You can
restore from an FSFS backup into a FSFS repository or a BDB repository. The
Subversion dump format is ?backend-agnostic?.

root:/tmp# svnadmin create --fs-type=fsfs testrepo


Next, load the full backup into the repository:

root:/tmp# bzcat svndump-0:782-opt-svn-repo1.txt.bz2 | svnadmin load testrepo


Of course, use zcat or just cat, depending on what kind of compression is in
use.

Follow that with loads for each of the incremental backups:

root:/tmp# bzcat svndump-783:785-opt-svn-repo1.txt.bz2 | svnadmin load testrepo
root:/tmp# bzcat svndump-786:800-opt-svn-repo1.txt.bz2 | svnadmin load testrepo


Again, use zcat or just cat as appropriate.

When this is done, your repository will be restored to the point of the last
commit indicated in the svndump file (in this case, to revision 800).

Note

Note: don't be surprised if, when you test this, the restored directory doesn't
have exactly the same contents as the original directory. I can't explain why
this happens, but if you execute svnadmin dump on both old and new
repositories, the results are identical. This means that the repositories do
contain the same content.

For more information on using Subversion, see the book Version Control with
Subversion (http://svnbook.red-bean.com/) or the Subversion FAQ (http://
subversion.tigris.org/faq.html).

Recovering Mailbox Data

Mailbox data is gathered by the Cedar Backup mbox extension. Cedar Backup will
create either full or incremental backups, but both kinds of backups are
treated identically when restoring.

Individual mbox files and mbox directories are treated a little differently,
since individual files are just compressed, but directories are collected into
a tar archive.

First, find the backup or backups you are interested in. Typically, you will
need the full backup from the first day of the week and each incremental backup
from the other days of the week.

The mbox extension creates files of the form mbox-*. Backup files for
individual mbox files might have a .gz or .bz2 extension depending on what kind
of compression you specified in configuration. Backup files for mbox
directories will have a .tar, .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 extension, again depending on
what kind of compression you specified in configuration.

There is one backup file for each configured mbox file or directory. The backup
file name represents the name of the file or directory and the date it was
backed up. So, the file mbox-20060624-home-user-mail-greylist represents the
backup for /home/user/mail/greylist run on 24 Jun 2006. Likewise,
mbox-20060624-home-user-mail.tar represents the backup for the /home/user/mail
directory run on that same date.

Once you have found the files you are looking for, the restoration procedure is
fairly simple. First, concatenate all of the backup files together. Then, use
grepmail to eliminate duplicate messages (if any).

Here is an example for a single backed-up file:

root:/tmp# rm restore.mbox # make sure it's not left over
root:/tmp# cat mbox-20060624-home-user-mail-greylist >> restore.mbox
root:/tmp# cat mbox-20060625-home-user-mail-greylist >> restore.mbox
root:/tmp# cat mbox-20060626-home-user-mail-greylist >> restore.mbox
root:/tmp# grepmail -a -u restore.mbox > nodups.mbox


At this point, nodups.mbox contains all of the backed-up messages from /home/
user/mail/greylist.

Of course, if your backups are compressed, you'll have to use zcat or bzcat
rather than just cat.

If you are backing up mbox directories rather than individual files, see the
filesystem instructions for notes on now to extract the individual files from
inside tar archives. Extract the files you are interested in, and then
concatenate them together just like shown above for the individual case.

Recovering Data split by the Split Extension

The Split extension takes large files and splits them up into smaller files.
Typically, it would be used in conjunction with the cback-span command.

The split up files are not difficult to work with. Simply find all of the files
? which could be split between multiple discs ? and concatenate them together.

root:/tmp# rm usr-src-software.tar.gz  # make sure it's not there
root:/tmp# cat usr-src-software.tar.gz_00001 >> usr-src-software.tar.gz
root:/tmp# cat usr-src-software.tar.gz_00002 >> usr-src-software.tar.gz
root:/tmp# cat usr-src-software.tar.gz_00003 >> usr-src-software.tar.gz


Then, use the resulting file like usual.

Remember, you need to have all of the files that the original large file was
split into before this will work. If you are missing a file, the result of the
concatenation step will be either a corrupt file or a truncated file (depending
on which chunks you did not include).

Appendix D. Securing Password-less SSH Connections

Cedar Backup relies on password-less public key SSH connections to make various
parts of its backup process work. Password-less scp is used to stage files from
remote clients to the master, and password-less ssh is used to execute actions
on managed clients.

Normally, it is a good idea to avoid password-less SSH connections in favor of
using an SSH agent. The SSH agent manages your SSH connections so that you
don't need to type your passphrase over and over. You get most of the benefits
of a password-less connection without the risk. Unfortunately, because Cedar
Backup has to execute without human involvement (through a cron job), use of an
agent really isn't feasable. We have to rely on true password-less public keys
to give the master access to the client peers.

Traditionally, Cedar Backup has relied on a ?segmenting? strategy to minimize
the risk. Although the backup typically runs as root ? so that all parts of the
filesystem can be backed up ? we don't use the root user for network
connections. Instead, we use a dedicated backup user on the master to initiate
network connections, and dedicated users on each of the remote peers to accept
network connections.

With this strategy in place, an attacker with access to the backup user on the
master (or even root access, really) can at best only get access to the backup
user on the remote peers. We still concede a local attack vector, but at least
that vector is restricted to an unprivileged user.

Some Cedar Backup users may not be comfortable with this risk, and others may
not be able to implement the segmentation strategy ? they simply may not have a
way to create a login which is only used for backups.

So, what are these users to do? Fortunately there is a solution. The SSH
authorized keys file supports a way to put a ?filter? in place on an SSH
connection. This excerpt is from the AUTHORIZED_KEYS FILE FORMAT section of man
8 sshd:

command="command"
   Specifies that the command is executed whenever this key is used for
   authentication.  The command supplied by the user (if any) is ignored.  The
   command is run on a pty if the client requests a pty; otherwise it is run
   without a tty.  If an 8-bit clean channel is required, one must not request
   a pty or should specify no-pty.  A quote may be included in the command by
   quoting it with a backslash.  This option might be useful to restrict
   certain public keys to perform just a specific operation.  An example might
   be a key that permits remote backups but nothing else.  Note that the client
   may specify TCP and/or X11 forwarding unless they are explicitly prohibited.
   Note that this option applies to shell, command or subsystem execution.


Essentially, this gives us a way to authenticate the commands that are being
executed. We can either accept or reject commands, and we can even provide a
readable error message for commands we reject. The filter is applied on the
remote peer, to the key that provides the master access to the remote peer.

So, let's imagine that we have two hosts: master ?mickey?, and peer ?minnie?.
Here is the original ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file for the backup user on minnie
(remember, this is all on one line in the file):

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAxw7EnqVULBFgPcut3WYp3MsSpVB9q9iZ+awek120391k;mm0c221=3=km
=m=askdalkS82mlF7SusBTcXiCk1BGsg7axZ2sclgK+FfWV1Jm0/I9yo9FtAZ9U+MmpL901231asdkl;ai1-923ma9s=9=
1-2341=-a0sd=-sa0=1z= backup@mickey


This line is the public key that minnie can use to identify the backup user on
mickey. Assuming that there is no passphrase on the private key back on mickey,
the backup user on mickey can get direct access to minnie.

To put the filter in place, we add a command option to the key, like this:

command="/opt/backup/validate-backup" ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAxw7EnqVULBFgPcut3WYp
3MsSpVB9q9iZ+awek120391k;mm0c221=3=km=m=askdalkS82mlF7SusBTcXiCk1BGsg7axZ2sclgK+FfWV1Jm0/I9yo9F
tAZ9U+MmpL901231asdkl;ai1-923ma9s=9=1-2341=-a0sd=-sa0=1z= backup@mickey


Basically, the command option says that whenever this key is used to
successfully initiate a connection, the /opt/backup/validate-backup command
will be run instead of the real command that came over the SSH connection.
Fortunately, the interface gives the command access to certain shell variables
that can be used to invoke the original command if you want to.

A very basic validate-backup script might look something like this:

#!/bin/bash
if [[ "${SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND}" == "ls -l" ]] ; then
    ${SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND}
else
   echo "Security policy does not allow command [${SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND}]."
   exit 1
fi


This script allows exactly ls -l and nothing else. If the user attempts some
other command, they get a nice error message telling them that their command
has been disallowed.

For remote commands executed over ssh, the original command is exactly what the
caller attempted to invoke. For remote copies, the commands are either scp -f
file (copy from the peer to the master) or scp -t file (copy to the peer from
the master).

If you want, you can see what command SSH thinks it is executing by using ssh
-v or scp -v. The command will be right at the top, something like this:

Executing: program /usr/bin/ssh host mickey, user (unspecified), command scp -v -f .profile
OpenSSH_4.3p2 Debian-9, OpenSSL 0.9.8c 05 Sep 2006
debug1: Reading configuration data /home/backup/.ssh/config
debug1: Applying options for daystrom
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: Applying options for *
debug2: ssh_connect: needpriv 0


Omit the -v and you have your command: scp -f .profile.

For a normal, non-managed setup, you need to allow the following commands,
where /path/to/collect/ is replaced with the real path to the collect directory
on the remote peer:

scp -f /path/to/collect/cback.collect
scp -f /path/to/collect/*
scp -t /path/to/collect/cback.stage


If you are configuring a managed client, then you also need to list the exact
command lines that the master will be invoking on the managed client. You are
guaranteed that the master will invoke one action at a time, so if you list two
lines per action (full and non-full) you should be fine. Here's an example for
the collect action:

/usr/bin/cback --full collect
/usr/bin/cback collect


Of course, you would have to list the actual path to the cback executable ?
exactly the one listed in the <cback_command> configuration option for your
managed peer.

I hope that there is enough information here for interested users to implement
something that makes them comfortable. I have resisted providing a complete
example script, because I think everyone's setup will be different. However,
feel free to write if you are working through this and you have questions.

Appendix E. Copyright


Copyright (c) 2004-2011,2013-2015
Kenneth J. Pronovici

This work is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License (the "GPL"), Version 2,
as published by the Free Software Foundation.

For the purposes of the GPL, the "preferred form of modification"
for this work is the original Docbook XML text files.  If you
choose to distribute this work in a compiled form (i.e. if you
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Docbook XML text files), you must also consider image files to be
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complete and readable compiled version of the work.

This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Copies of the GNU General Public License are available from
the Free Software Foundation website, http://www.gnu.org/.
You may also write the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA

====================================================================

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