The Search for the Ideal Backup Tool Part 1 of 2

In the context of virtualization, backing up VM images to storage nodes involves moving very large files. Many VM images are just copies of the OS and data on top. So data deduplication and compression must offer great savings. In our search, we found various utilities which we list later down. But we settled into reviewing two popular ones zbackup and attic . Another popular tool bup was considered but few things like unable to prune old versions was major point for us.

The main requirements were data deduplication, compression, easy to script with and encryption all in one tool. In this article, we will give a background on their usage on CentOS 7.1. We don’t plan on extensive evaluation of various other capabilities as we are looking for these basic features to be done well.

ZBackup

ZBackup describes itself as a globally-deduplicating backup tool originating its inspiration from bup and rsync tools. As you add more files to the archives, it will store duplicate regions once. It also supports AES encrypted files.

Installing ZBackup on CentOS 7.1

ZBackup is the easiest to install. Its available in the EPEL repos and you can simply do yum install zbackup.

Usage

The archive is called a repository in ZBackup.  Its nothing but a folder created for the tool to use where it stores its metadata and all the files added into it for backup.

First step is to initialize the folder , say zbak, with metadata folders.

zbackup init --non-encrypted /kvmbackup/zbak

If you need encryption, you can enable it with a key file.

Next is add files into it.

zbackup backup --non-encrypted --threads 8 --cache-size 1024mb /kvmbackup/zbak/backups/centos_nfs.img.20150721040100  < /virtual_machines/images/centos_nfs.img

It’ll take time for the first add. Subsequent add of the same source file name but with modified contents is generally faster.

Restore files as follows:

zbackup --non-encrypted restore zbak/backups/centos_nfs.img.20150721040100 > /virtual_machines/images/centos_nfs.img

Attic

Attic describes itself as a deduplicating backup program to provide an efficient and secure way to perform daily backups.

INSTALLING Attic ON CENTOS 7.1

Install Python 3.4 from EPEL

yum install python34
curl https://attic-backup.org/downloads/releases/0.14/Attic-0.14-linux-x86_64.tar.gz | tar -C /usr/local/share/ -zxf -
ln -s /usr/local/share/Attic-0.14-linux-x86_64/attic /usr/local/bin/attic

Usage

The archive is also called a repository in Attic.

First step is to initialize the folder , say atticrepo.attic, with metadata folders. In this case, attic can create the folder if it doesn’t exist.

attic init /kvmbackup/atticrepo.attic

Next is add files into it.

attic create --stats /KVMBACK/atticrepo.attic::20150721040100  /virtual_machines/images/centos_nfs.img <otherfiles if necessary>

Restore files as follows:

attic extract atticrepo.attic::20150721040100 virtual_machines/images/centos_nfs.img

One immediate quirk feature of Attic is destination directory can’t be specified as of version 0.14. It will extract it to the current directory but will maintain the original path.

This makes scripted use of this tool a little inconvenient. This feature seems to be on their todo list. But would hope its available sooner.

Which One to choose?

This is the subject of our next post. In the next part, we will compare the speeds of both these tools on backup and on restore path.

Other backup utilities we considered

  • bup
  • Duplicity
  • rsync
  • rdiff-backup
  • backula
  • ZFS  (filesystem, not tool)

Most were either lacking all features we were looking for or were too complex.  Do let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Also see comparison of backup tools on Ask Ubuntu for a list of desktop/GUI tools.

4 thoughts on “The Search for the Ideal Backup Tool Part 1 of 2

    1. Thanks! We discovered BorgBackup right about when we were finishing up. As you can see, we spent a lot of time in the data gathering. We’ll do another run in another series. We look at the evaluation in a later phase.

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