'Sparsebak'
Fast Time Machine-like disk image backups for Qubes OS and Linux LVM.
Introduction
------------
Sparsebak is aimed at incremental backup management for logical volumes.
The focus on condensing logical volume metadata is combined with a
sparsebundle-style (similar to OS X Time Machine) storage format that
enables flexible and quick archive operations.
The upshot of this combination is that Sparsebak has nearly
instantaneous access to volume changes (no repeated scanning of volume
data!), remains space-efficient regardless of file sizes within a
volume, avoids snapshot space consumption pitfalls, and can make an
indefinite* number of frequent backups to an archive with relatively
little CPU / disk IO overhead.
Sparsebak is optimized to process data as streams whenever possible,
which avoids writing temporary caches of data to disk. It also doesn't
require the source admin system to ever mount processed volumes, meaning
untrusted data and guest filesystems can be handled safely on Qubes OS
and other security-oriented hypervisors.
(* See `prune` command for freeing space in the destination archive.)
Status - Alpha version
------
Can do full or incremental backups of Linux thin-provisioned LVM to
local dom0 or VM filesystems or via ssh, as well as simple volume
retrieval for restore and verify.
Fast pruning of past backup sessions is now possible.
Data verification currently relies on SHA-256 manifests being safely
stored on the source/admin system to maintain integrity. Encryption and
key-based verification are not yet implemented.
The codebase at this stage is lean at only 1,050+ lines of Python.
A partial 'Todo' list:
* Basic functions: Volume selection options, Delete
* Inclusion of system-specific metadata in backups (Qubes VM configs, etc.)
* Additional functions: Untar, receive-archive, verify-archive
* Show configured vs present volumes in list output
* Encryption integration
* File name and sequence obfuscation
* Pool-based Deduplication
* Additional sanity checks
* Btrfs, XFS, ZFS support
Comments.....
So far my experience with Sparsebak since I started using it this past
July has been very positive with fast and accurate backups - and at
times its been fun to code, too. I hope the Qubes community finds it
interesting and useful as well.
One more item under 'Todo' I should also mention is the name: I don't
really like the current working title and would appreciate your
suggestions and PRs on this and many other issues!
--
Chris Laprise, tas...@posteo.net
https://github.com/tasket
https://twitter.com/ttaskett
PGP: BEE2 20C5 356E 764A 73EB 4AB3 1DC4 D106 F07F 1886
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