Backup to FI

Home directories and mail

Your faculty Unix home directories and mail stored at FI are backed up (does not apply to mail redirected to IS, etc.). Backups are usually done daily and are kept for approximately one year (at least for the last month, you should be able to restore data from a specific day, older data is only kept at one month intervals). If you accidentally delete any data, we can restore it from a backup. Please see below how to proceed in such a case.

Backup for laboratories and staff

We can provide backups of servers and PCs to FI laboratories and staff using Bacula by appointment. If you are interested, please email unix@fi.muni.cz. In your request, please indicate the approximate amount of data you would need to back up.

Data recovery

If you are interested in restoring your data, please email unix@fi.muni.cz with the names of the directories (or files) and 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 you would like to restore the data yourself, we will make the Bacula console ( bconsole) available on your machine and provide instructions.

Instructions for setting up the backed up machine

Linux

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

• Put the following content in the configuration file /etc/bacula/bacula-fd.conf:

  #
  # List Directors who are permitted to contact this File daemon
  #
  Director {
  Name = backup-dir
     Password = "here we have a hard to guess password"
  }

  #
  # "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 bacula-fd.service service is enabled and running:

  systemctl enable --now bacula-fd.service
 

• Any changes to the configuration will take effect after the service has been restarted.

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

• If you are using TCP wrappers, add a line to /etc/hosts.allow ( hostname replace the machine hostname, it must match the Bacula configuration):

  hostname-fd: backup.fi.muni.cz
 

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

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

• We typically keep the data for one year. Backups can be run once a week, several times a week, or every day. If you have a preferred time to run backups, let us know.

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

Windows

It should be possible to backup Windows machines as well, if interested, get in touch.

What else do we back up

• faculty databases
• Gitlab repositories

What we don't 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
• Stratus.FI virtual machine disk images, but we can restore them a few days after deletion