Fun with brackup
I've been playing around with Brad Fitzpatrick's brackup for the last couple of weeks. It's a backup tool that "slices, dices, encrypts, and sprays across the net" - notably to Amazon S3, but also to filesystems (local or networked), FTP servers, or SSH/SFTP servers.
I'm using it to backup my home directories and all my image and music files both to a linux server I have available in a data centre (via SFTP) and to Amazon S3.
brackup's a bit rough around the edges and could do with some better documentation and some optimisation, but it's pretty useful as it stands. Here are a few notes and tips from my playing so far, to save others a bit of time.
Version: as I write the latest version on CPAN is 1.06, but that's pretty old - you really want to use the current subversion trunk instead. Installation is the standard perl module incantation e.g.
# Checkout from svn or whatever
cd brackup
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
sudo make install
Basic usage is as follows:
# First-time through (on linux, in my case):
cd
mkdir brackup
cd brackup
brackup
Error: Your config file needs tweaking. I put a commented-out template at:
/home/gavin/.brackup.conf
# Edit the vanilla .brackup.conf that was created for you.
# You want to setup at least one SOURCE and one TARGET section initially,
# and probably try something smallish i.e. not your 50GB music collection!
# The Filesystem target is probably the best one to try out first.
# See '`perldoc Brackup::Root`' and '`perldoc Brackup::Target`' for examples
$EDITOR ~/.brackup.conf
# Now run your first backup changing SOURCE and TARGET below to the names
# you used in your .brackup.conf file
brackup -v --from=SOURCE --to=TARGET
# You can also do a dry run to see what brackup's going to do (undocumented)
brackup -v --from=SOURCE --to=TARGET --dry-run
If all goes well you should get some fairly verbose output about all the files
in your SOURCE tree that are being backed up for you, and finally a brackup
output file (typically named SOURCE-DATE.brackup) should be written to your
current directory. You'll need this brackup file to do your restores, but it's
also stored on the target along with your backup, so you can also retrieve it
from there (using brackup-target, below) if your local copy gets lost, or if
you need to restore to somewhere else.
Restores reference that SOURCE-DATE.brackup file you just created:
# Create somewhere to restore to
mkdir -p /tmp/brackup-restore/full
# Restore the full tree you just backed up
brackup-restore -v --from=SOURCE-DATE.brackup --to=/tmp/brackup-restore/full --full
# Or restore just a subset of the tree
brackup-restore -v --from=SOURCE-DATE.brackup --to=/tmp/brackup-restore --just=DIR
brackup-restore -v --from=SOURCE-DATE.brackup --to=/tmp/brackup-restore --just=FILE
You can also use the brackup-target utility to query a target for the
backups it has available, and do various kinds of cleanup:
# List the backups available on the given target
brackup-target TARGET list_backups
# Get the brackup output file for a specific backup (to restore)
brackup-target TARGET get_backup BACKUPFILE
# Delete a brackup file on the target
brackup-target TARGET delete_backup BACKUPFILE
# Prune the target to the most recent N backup files
brackup-target --keep-backups 15 TARGET prune
# Remove backup chunks no longer referenced by any backup file
brackup-target TARGET gc
That should be enough to get you up and running with brackup - I'll
cover some additional tips and tricks in a subsequent post.