Backup to FI

Home directories and mail

Your faculty Unix home directories and e- mails stored on FI are backed up (does not apply to e-mails redirected to IS, etc.). Backups usually take place daily and are kept for approximately one year (it should be possible to restore data from a specific day for at least the last month, older data is only kept at one month intervals). If you accidentally delete some data, we can restore it from a backup. Below you will find how to proceed in such a case.

Backup for laboratories and employees

Upon agreement, we can provide FI laboratories and FI employees with server and PC backups using the Bacula tool. If you are interested, write to unix@fi.muni.cz . Please indicate in the application the approximate amount of data you would need to back up.

Data recovery

If you are interested in data recovery, write to unix@fi.muni.cz names of directories (or files) and at the same time the date before which you still had the data. Alternatively, at least try to explain your situation.

If we are backing up a machine under your management and would like to restore the data yourself, we will make the Bacula console available to you ( bconsole ) on your machine and we will provide instructions.

Instructions for setting up a backup machine

Linux

• Install the client, in most distributions the package is called bacula-client .

• To the configuration file /etc/bacula/bacula-fd.conf insert this content:

  #
  # List Directors who are permitted to contact this File daemon
  #
  Director {
  Name = backup-dir
     Password = "vygenerované silné heslo"
  }
  
  #
  # "Global" File daemon configuration specifications
  #
  FileDaemon {                      # this is me
     Name = "bacula-fd"
     FDport = 9102                  # where we listen for the director
     WorkingDirectory = /var/spool/bacula
     Pid Directory = /var/run
     Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20
  }
  
  # Send all messages except skipped files back to Director
  Messages {
     Name = Standard
     director = backup-dir = all, !skipped, !restored
  }
  

• Make sure the service bacula-fd.service is enabled and that it runs:

  systemctl enable --now bacula-fd.service
  

• Any configuration changes will not take effect until the service is restarted.

• If you are using a local firewall on the machine, allow port access 9102 from the server backup.fi.muni.cz .

• If you use TCP wrappers, do /etc/hosts.allow add line ( hostname replace the hostname of the machine, it must match the configuration of Bacula):

  hostname-fd: backup.fi.muni.cz
  

• To the address unix@fi.muni.cz send a request specifying a directory or a list of directories to be backed up. The entire contents of a directory on the same file system are backed up recursively.

• You can exclude a subdirectory of the backup tree from the backup - this can be achieved by setting it on the backup server, or we usually set the directory (and all its contents including subdirectories) not backed up if you place a file called '.BACULA_NO_BACKUP' .

• We typically store data for one year. You can back up once a week, several times a week, or every day. If you have a preferred time to run backups, write to us.

• If you would like to back up the database, you need to export the database (so-called dump) somewhere to the backup space, either from cron, or you can set which script is to be run before running the backup.

Windows

It should also be possible to back up Windows machines, in case of interest, contact us.

What we do not back up

The following list contains examples of data that we do not back up. It is not exhaustive.

• directories and files on a Unix volume /data
• virtual machine disk images Stratus.FI