Describe the Backup Process

[Whytey]

Hi,

I have been playing with LxdMosaic within an lxd container. The product seems to have matured since I last looked at it a few months ago, nice job!

One of the things I was drawn by is the ability to do backups but there is very little info about these that I can find.

Could you describe the back up? I traditionally do an export so I have a full backup I could import the backup as a recovery mechanism. Where do the backed up files go? Is it possible to automate this for new containers, also?

I would be happy to help you document what you tell me in a pull request, depending on the plan you have for documentation for the project.

Cheers,
Whytey

[turtle0x1]

Hey, thanks for your feedback - ill try my best to explain, a PR would be great.

Backups in LXDMosaic are a almost a direct copy of the lxc export command bound by all the same limitations (requires storage space to exist on the server)

How that works is you say to LXD "make a backup" which causes LXD to produce a tar.gz file that is then available to download LXDMosaic downloads that archive and tells LXD to delete the backup.

The backup files are stored under a path LXDMosaic can access except for when your using the SNAP which has restricted file system access.

The hierarchy used in this location is $hostId/$project/$instance/$date-backup.tar.gz

There is three important settings that should be set when backups are going to be used;

• Timezone
• Backup Directory
• Backup History

Timezone: Regardless of where the end users web browser is, the backups will run according to the time zone set in the LXDMosaic setting (ignoring the system timezone)

Backup Directory: path to store the backup files, can only be changed outside of SNAP

Backup History: How long we keep the record of the backup (for nice graphs showing space used N months ago & to monitor growth / use)

Settings vaguely described here

Let me know if youd like more details / have more questions.