Backups

What’s this gap in the graphs?

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I was checking email this (Friday Jul 19, 2024) morning, over coffee, while many IT folks dealt with Cloudstrike fallout, when I noticed this message from the logs: Jul 19 09:12:18 zuul kernel: [zone: pf states] PF states limit reached I’ve seen that message before. It’s not of high concern. That server contains many services including PGCon, the former BSDCan website, and my blogs. I didn’t give it much concern, although I should […]

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Where’s my backup?

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Nagios was telling me: FILE_AGE WARNING: /usr/home/rsyncer/backups/aws-1/postgresql/freshports.org.dump is 117636 seconds old and 3608113799 bytes That means the FreshPorts backup is more than a day old, and it should have been refreshed by now. OK, let’s go look. I log into the host known as aws-1 and check the files. They look fresh to me: [rsyncer@aws-1 ~/backups/database-backup/postgresql]$ ls -lt total 3525154 -rw-r–r– 1 rsyncer rsyncer 3963 Jul 16 02:14 globals.sql drwxr-xr-x 2 rsyncer rsyncer

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Using a third party tool to drive tarsnap backups

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I have used Tarsnap since at least 2017. The jobs ran nightly. It wasn’t until three years later, that I started cleaning up old backups. Now I’ve found a tool which manages this for me (sysutils/acts) courtesy of a toot by M W Lucas. The selling point of this tool: By default, 31 daily, 12 monthly, and indefinite yearly backups are kept. Sounds good enough for me. I’ll buy that. The install and

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Creating a Time Capsule instance using Samba, FreeBSD, and ZFS

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I recently moved a Time Capsule instance from a FreeBSD host into a jail. Today, I’m going to create a new Time Capsule which uses Samba instead of AFP. Why? Samba seems to be the preferred solution because AFP has been deprecated. It still works, but let’s go Samba. Not covered in this post, but recommended: snapshot your datasets on a regular basis. I like using sanoid for that. That way, if your

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Moving time capsule from host to jail and connecting my MacBook to ZFS on FreeBSD

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I have Macbooks at home I use them. I use Time Capsule on ZFS on FreeBSD to back them up. In this post: FreeBSD 13.2 OSX Ventura 13.6 I first implemented this directly on the FreeBSD host. Today, I am moving that service into a jail. This post will roughly outline the changes I made to accomplish this move. It won’t go into the details of how to set up Time Capsule. See

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Bacula – copying the latest jobs over from one SD to another

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I want to copy the latest backups for each Bacula client over to a new host. I already do this, on an automated basis, for recent backups, primarily to have the same backups in two different places. In this case, I want to do this once. This post might also be a good introduction to copying / moving jobs based on SQL queries. See also Bacula – copy to tape by job size

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Tarsnap – cleaning up old backups

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I use Tarsnap for my critical data. Case in point, I use it to backup my Bacula database dump. I use Bacula to backup my hosts. The database in question keeps track of what was backed up, from what host, the file size, checksum, where that backup is now, and many other items. Losing this data is annoying but not a disaster. It can be recreated from the backup volumes, but that is

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mysqldump: Error: ‘Access denied; you need (at least one of) the PROCESS privilege(s) for this operation’ when trying to dump tablespaces

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See also Creating read-only PostgreSQL database users for pg_dump and pg_dumpall. I’m linking this because I use both articles on a regular basis. The error After a recent upgrade of MySQL server from 5.7.30 to 5.7.31, my database backups started encountered this error: mysqldump: Error: ‘Access denied; you need (at least one of) the PROCESS privilege(s) for this operation’ when trying to dump tablespaces The search Searching, I found a Kanyakonil post which

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The backups have been wrong for about 97 days

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I backup my databases daily. They get dumped to a disk file and copied somewhere else. Then they are backed up into a file system. Once a month they get copied to tape. Yesterday I upgraded a PostgreSQL database server, and it went well. Overnight, a backup failed. This is the story of how that led to me discovering my backups have been at risk for nearly 100 days. The error This morning

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Creating read-only PostgreSQL database users for pg_dump and pg_dumpall

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See also mysqldump: Error: ‘Access denied; you need (at least one of) the PROCESS privilege(s) for this operation’ when trying to dump tablespaces. I’m linking this because I use both articles on a regular basis. Sometimes you want a user which can only dump the database, but nothing else. Fortunately, I searched, and found a solution. I’m writing it down so I only have to search this blog. I want the user rsyncer

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