The Backup Process
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## The Backup Process

The Cedar Backup backup process is structured in terms of a set of decoupled actions which execute independently (based on a schedule in cron) rather than through some highly coordinated flow of control.

This design decision has both positive and negative consequences. On the one hand, the code is much simpler and can choose to simply abort or log an error if its expectations are not met. On the other hand, the administrator must coordinate the various actions during initial set-up. See the section called “Coordination between Master and Clients” (later in this chapter) for more information on this subject.

A standard backup run consists of four steps (actions), some of which execute on the master machine, and some of which execute on one or more client machines. These actions are: collect, stage, store and purge.

In general, more than one action may be specified on the command-line. If more than one action is specified, then actions will be taken in a sensible order (generally collect, stage, store, purge). A special all action is also allowed, which implies all of the standard actions in the same sensible order.

The cback command also supports several actions that are not part of the standard backup run and cannot be executed along with any other actions. These actions are validate, initialize and rebuild. All of the various actions are discussed further below.

See Chapter 5, Configuration for more information on how a backup run is configured.

### The Collect Action

The collect action is the first action in a standard backup run. It executes on both master and client nodes. Based on configuration, this action traverses the peer's filesystem and gathers files to be backed up. Each configured high-level directory is collected up into its own tar file in the collect directory. The tarfiles can either be uncompressed (`.tar`) or compressed with either gzip (`.tar.gz`) or bzip2 (`.tar.bz2`).

There are three supported collect modes: daily, weekly and incremental. Directories configured for daily backups are backed up every day. Directories configured for weekly backups are backed up on the first day of the week. Directories configured for incremental backups are traversed every day, but only the files which have changed (based on a saved-off SHA hash) are actually backed up.

Collect configuration also allows for a variety of ways to filter files and directories out of the backup. For instance, administrators can configure an ignore indicator file [9] or specify absolute paths or filename patterns [10] to be excluded. You can even configure a backup “link farm” rather than explicitly listing files and directories in configuration.

This action is optional on the master. You only need to configure and execute the collect action on the master if you have data to back up on that machine. If you plan to use the master only as a “consolidation point” to collect data from other machines, then there is no need to execute the collect action there. If you run the collect action on the master, it behaves the same there as anywhere else, and you have to stage the master's collected data just like any other client (typically by configuring a local peer in the stage action).

### The Stage Action

The stage action is the second action in a standard backup run. It executes on the master peer node. The master works down the list of peers in its backup pool and stages (copies) the collected backup files from each of them into a daily staging directory by peer name.

For the purposes of this action, the master node can be configured to treat itself as a client node. If you intend to back up data on the master, configure the master as a local peer. Otherwise, just configure each of the clients as a remote peer.

Local and remote client peers are treated differently. Local peer collect directories are assumed to be accessible via normal copy commands (i.e. on a mounted filesystem) while remote peer collect directories are accessed via an RSH-compatible command such as ssh.

If a given peer is not ready to be staged, the stage process will log an error, abort the backup for that peer, and then move on to its other peers. This way, one broken peer cannot break a backup for other peers which are up and running.

Keep in mind that Cedar Backup is flexible about what actions must be executed as part of a backup. If you would prefer, you can stop the backup process at this step, and skip the store step. In this case, the staged directories will represent your backup rather than a disc.

### Note

Directories “collected” by another process can be staged by Cedar Backup. If the file `cback.collect` exists in a collect directory when the stage action is taken, then that directory will be staged.

### The Store Action

The store action is the third action in a standard backup run. It executes on the master peer node. The master machine determines the location of the current staging directory, and then writes the contents of that staging directory to disc. After the contents of the directory have been written to disc, an optional validation step ensures that the write was successful.

If the backup is running on the first day of the week, if the drive does not support multisession discs, or if the `--full` option is passed to the cback command, the disc will be rebuilt from scratch. Otherwise, a new ISO session will be added to the disc each day the backup runs.

This action is entirely optional. If you would prefer to just stage backup data from a set of peers to a master machine, and have the staged directories represent your backup rather than a disc, this is fine.

### Warning

The store action is not supported on the Mac OS X (darwin) platform. On that platform, the “automount” function of the Finder interferes significantly with Cedar Backup's ability to mount and unmount media and write to the CD or DVD hardware. The Cedar Backup writer and image functionality works on this platform, but the effort required to fight the operating system about who owns the media and the device makes it nearly impossible to execute the store action successfully.

### The Purge Action

The purge action is the fourth and final action in a standard backup run. It executes both on the master and client peer nodes. Configuration specifies how long to retain files in certain directories, and older files and empty directories are purged.

Typically, collect directories are purged daily, and stage directories are purged weekly or slightly less often (if a disc gets corrupted, older backups may still be available on the master). Some users also choose to purge the configured working directory (which is used for temporary files) to eliminate any leftover files which might have resulted from changes to configuration.

### The All Action

The all action is a pseudo-action which causes all of the actions in a standard backup run to be executed together in order. It cannot be combined with any other actions on the command line.

Extensions cannot be executed as part of the all action. If you need to execute an extended action, you must specify the other actions you want to run individually on the command line. [11]

The all action does not have its own configuration. Instead, it relies on the individual configuration sections for all of the other actions.

### The Validate Action

The validate action is used to validate configuration on a particular peer node, either master or client. It cannot be combined with any other actions on the command line.

The validate action checks that the configuration file can be found, that the configuration file is valid, and that certain portions of the configuration file make sense (for instance, making sure that specified users exist, directories are readable and writable as necessary, etc.).

### The Initialize Action

The initialize action is used to initialize media for use with Cedar Backup. This is an optional step. By default, Cedar Backup does not need to use initialized media and will write to whatever media exists in the writer device.

However, if the “check media” store configuration option is set to true, Cedar Backup will check the media before writing to it and will error out if the media has not been initialized.

Initializing the media consists of writing a mostly-empty image using a known media label (the media label will begin with “CEDAR BACKUP”).

Note that only rewritable media (CD-RW, DVD+RW) can be initialized. It doesn't make any sense to initialize media that cannot be rewritten (CD-R, DVD+R), since Cedar Backup would then not be able to use that media for a backup. You can still configure Cedar Backup to check non-rewritable media; in this case, the check will also pass if the media is apparently unused (i.e. has no media label).

### The Rebuild Action

The rebuild action is an exception-handling action that is executed independent of a standard backup run. It cannot be combined with any other actions on the command line.

The rebuild action attempts to rebuild “this week's” disc from any remaining unpurged staging directories. Typically, it is used to make a copy of a backup, replace lost or damaged media, or to switch to new media mid-week for some other reason.

To decide what data to write to disc again, the rebuild action looks back and finds the first day of the current week. Then, it finds any remaining staging directories between that date and the current date. If any staging directories are found, they are all written to disc in one big ISO session.

The rebuild action does not have its own configuration. It relies on configuration for other other actions, especially the store action.

[9] Analagous to `.cvsignore` in CVS

[10] In terms of Python regular expressions

[11] Some users find this surprising, because extensions are configured with sequence numbers. I did it this way because I felt that running extensions as part of the all action would sometimes result in surprising behavior. I am not planning to change the way this works.

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