rbt

rbt stands for Rsync Backup Tool and is a wrapper around rsync to simplify the process of making incremental backups from remote servers to local filesystems with rsync.

Usage

The program accepts command line arguments like a python file name (or files names) which describe what remote files should be copied and where on the local filesystems to store backups. A sample python configuration file looks like this - server.hostname.com.py:

# configuration file
config = {
    "templates": [
        {
            "name": "default",
            "backups": 28,
            "files": [
                "/etc",
            ],
        },
    ],
    "servers": [
        {
            "name": "server.hostname.com",
            "backups": 182,
            "target": "/backup/webservers/{name}",
            "files": [
                "/opt",
                "/etc",
                "/var",
                "/home",
                "/root",
                "/backup",
            ],
            "exclude": [
                "/var/lib/mysql",
                "/var/lib/postgresql",
            ],
        },
        {
            "name": "server2.hostname.com",
            "template": "default",
            "target": "/backup/customers/{name}",
        },
    ],
}

Configuration file names are provided with --config command line option. It is possible to provide more than one file to sequentially run backups on multiple servers:

rbt.py backup --servers server1.hostname.com --servers server5.otherhostname.com

Configuration files must be valid python files that define a single dictionary named config, however it is not necessary to specify file extension with --config option. It will be appended if necessary. If the provided file name does not exist, rbt will try to also search for it in /etc/rbt directory.

One configuration file may specify more than one server to backup (see example above).

Configuration fields

Configuration files are in YAML format and have several fields to configure backup jobs. These are:

• name - this is the name of the server that is to be backed up; it must be resolvable address because this is used to connect to the remote server
• backups - the number of backup copies to keep; last (newest) backup copy is always in a directory $target/backup.0
• target - the root directory for server backups
• files - list of files / directories names to copy from the remote server in backup directories
• exclude - list of files / directories to exclude from backups

Authentication

rbt does not provide any means to set remote user, port and authentication method. This configuration should be present in ~/.ssh/config instead.