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 forwarded to IS, etc.). Backups usually take place daily and are stored for approximately one year (at least for the last month, it should be possible to restore data from a specific day, older data is only stored at one month intervals). If you accidentally delete some data, we can restore it from your backup. Below you will find out how to proceed in this case.

Backup for labs 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.

In the event that we back up the machine under your control 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 = "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 service bacula-fd.service is allowed 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 row ( 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 stating the directory or the list of directories to be backed up. The entire contents of the 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 that the directory (and all its contents including subdirectories) is 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 dump the database somewhere in the backed up space, either from cron, or you can set which script to run before running the backup.

Windows

It should be possible to back up Windows machines as well, if you are interested, please contact us.

What else are we backing up?

• faculty database
• repositories in Gitlabu

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
• virtual machine disk images Stratus.FI