Documentation

Documentation

SafeKeep comes with manual pages for the application, and the configuration file:

• safekeep(1) man page
• safekeep.backup(5) man page
• safekeep.conf(5) man page

Quick Example

This example will walk you through the setup of SafeKeep to backup a small LAN comprised of two workstations called oak and pine, onto a server named forrest. For simplicity's sake, we will assume that:

• we are interested in backing up only the user's personal data;
• there is a lot of music (MP3s) that we do not care about;
• we are using LVM everywhere, and we want to use it for snapshots;
• there is enough space (>500MB) on your Volume Groups for the snapshots;
• boxes run a RedHat-based distribution, such as Fedora.

First we need to get SafeKeep installed on all the boxes:

[root@oak ~] rpm -Uvh safekeep-{common,client}-1.5.1-1.noarch.rpm
[root@pine ~] rpm -Uvh safekeep-{common,client}-1.5.1-1.noarch.rpm
[root@forrest ~] rpm -Uvh safekeep-{common,server}-1.5.1-1.noarch.rpm

This is all we have to do on the clients. The next steps will happen on the server side (on forrest in our case).

Next, we need to create a file for each of the boxes we need to backup:

[root@forrest ~] cat /etc/safekeep/backup.d/oak.backup
<backup>
  <host name="oak" />
  <setup>
      <snapshot device="/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00" size="500M" />
  </setup>

  <data>
    <exclude regexp=".*\.mp3"/>
    <include path="/home"/>
  </data>
</backup>

[root@forrest ~] cat /etc/safekeep/backup.d/pine.backup
<backup>
  <host name="pine" />
  <setup>
      <snapshot device="/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00" size="500M" />
  </setup>

  <data>
    <exclude regexp=".*\.mp3"/>
    <include path="/home"/>
  </data>
</backup>

Now all we have to do is tell SafeKeep to deploy the SSH keys:

[root@forrest ~] safekeep --keys --deploy

Done! The server RPM has already installed a cron job that will run once a day and thus backup the workstations daily.