What should i backup on these servers?

Rauldinho · 09-01-2008, 11:11 AM

Hi, i have the task of making backups from different servers and i wanted to know from anyones experience what files/folders should i backup? The server i'm talking about include:
- Asterisk Server
- Web Server (Apache, MySQL, PHP)
- Mail (Postfix)
- And a Firewall.

What should i copy to my backup server from each one of the servers above? Including the configurations files from linux that may be important. Thanks for any answer i may get!

checkmate3001 · 09-01-2008, 12:40 PM

I would definitely backup the data (ie: the website that apache is serving, the mail that postfix is accepting, etc.)
apache may be located /var/www or /srv/www
postfix mail may be located /var/mail or something similar.
I don't know where mysql or php stuff may be located.
Firewall likely will be a script in /etc/rc(something)

backup the /etc/apache(whatever)
backup the /etc/postfix/(whatever)
and anything else you can find for mysql and php.

That's all I can recommend. Have a good plan. Test it.

brianmcgee · 09-01-2008, 01:36 PM

Bare in mind that if you backup single directories you might up finding out that the very file you need to restore is excluded from your backup.

If you have the space and possibility, backup the whole server.

Rauldinho · 09-02-2008, 09:45 AM

thanks for your answer. I've been reading a lot about backup in linux and i found about bacula and i'm thinking about implementing this one. Am i going in the right direction with this software? I dont have the amount of space to backup the whole server but i would like to know how can i do that? what software should i use? Thanks for guiding me on this one!

chrism01 · 09-02-2008, 07:33 PM

You could also look at amanda.
For MySQL I'd look at mysqldump, to ensure you get a consistent dataset.

choogendyk · 09-02-2008, 07:53 PM

Actually, for MySQL, you want Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL. There was a review of it in the recent edition of Linux Journal, and you can find a link about 2/3 of the way down on this page of links: http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup.

jschiwal · 09-02-2008, 08:46 PM

What filesystem do you use. On a recent twit FLOSS episode the lead programmer for drizzle recommended performing a flush and then an LVM snapshot or ZFS snapshot for live backups. That way you perform the same procedure to backup the database as you do for the application server. The XFS file system can perform a backup with xfsdump.

choogendyk · 09-03-2008, 06:48 AM

Snapshots are not a cure-all for database backups. I use fssnap on Solaris 9 with ufsdump in a wrapper I wrote that is called by Amanda. This is a major improvement on simply having Amanda call ufsdump. However, you still want to use proper procedures for databases. Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL does that. It manages both full and incremental backups to disk using appropriate procedures - http://www.zmanda.com/backup-mysql.html. Then, if you use Amanda for your general backups, it can process those out to tape.