How to Backup Your IPBrick

IPBrick 6.1  has 4 key areas where data is stored

• /home1*
• /home2
• Postgres System Database
• Postgres User Database

*/home1 is a very important area. It shares this mount point with user data and system data. If your IPrick is very busy will be beneficial if you mount this area to a SAN with ample discs and IOPS

IPBrick has a number of housekeeping activties it performs at 00:30 each night. It dumps out all database’s into /home1/backupSYS. These are the files that you should include in your file backups so you can restore your system case of total failure. (Please keep your other system conf change control files safe)

You have no control over the frequency of these database backups. This means even if you perform file system backups every hour, your database dump will always be dated at 00:30. You can perform a database dump of your user database files at any time you want

I suggest running filebackups to a External NAS using NFS or a SMB share or a USB drive mounted on the IPBrick.
IPBrick 6 uses Multipath by default, When connecting hard drives , LUNS and block storage you will need to identify the device using its UUID and /dev/mapper name.

eg:
ipbrick:/usr/local/bin# blkid
/dev/mapper/350024e92018c3aeb-part1: UUID="4882d6ff-875d-4044-bab8-e52082b68e5a" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sdd1: LABEL="backups" UUID="52a1d002-1fa9-4d0d-a918-2b71da70320e" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/mapper/35000000000000001-part1: LABEL="backups" UUID="52a1d002-1fa9-4d0d-a918-2b71da70320e" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"

Use Rsnapshot to create snapshots backups of hourly,weekly,monthly and yearly. Rsnapshot is very efficient with disc space, and I suggest running this every 4 hours.

The system database is a protected database managed by the ipbrick itself. To perform more regular backups of the system dbdoc database you will need a special script from IPbrick called ipbrickdb_ip6. This script can be used to dump the database to keep to your file system BEFORE rsnapshot runs

Usage:

./ipbrickdb_ipb6  --dump --dbname dbdoc          --file /home1/_work/dump_dbdoc.sql

or

./ipbrickdb_ipb6  --restore --dbname dbdoc          --file /home1/_work/dump_dbdoc.sql

Within /etc/rsnapshot.conf tell rsnapshot to run this command BEFORE it peforms your backup by setting the path to this script in the following section

cmd_preexec /usr/local/bin/ipbrickdb_ipb6  --dump --dbname dbdoc          --file /home1/_work/dump_dbdoc.sql