The purpose of this project is to practice creating a complete backup policy using a real scenario. You will also explore several commonly used tools used to perform backups.
You may work in small groups on this project, as long as the names of all group members are included. Note each group member must submit an identical copy of the project.
Design a backup policy / strategy for
You need to take into account available backup hardware, however you
can recommend new hardware if you feel it is worth-while.
(In that case exact model name and number and prices, obtained from
the Internet, are required.)
You can contact HCC's
for any information you may need.
HCC's backup policies and
Obtaining Services from OIT (which contains HCC's
Any information you get must be credited, that is you must say
who told you what, and when.
In addition, you can use your YborStudent account to run various
commands to examine the system,
See Backups and Archives for background information. Your backup policy must be very specific and detailed, and include the following information:
dump, or some specific commercial software) will be used?
Please briefly justify your choices and decisions.
For this part you will backup
/home from your assigned classroom computer,
after you have completed your post-install setup
You will use a variety of tools and techniques for this
including using LVM
(For more information please see
the LVM Guide.)
Since we lack backup hardware you should keep the backup archives in
Note you can always send the backup files as email attachments to
yourself and then burn them to a CD.
(If your classroom computer includes a CD burner you can use
Perform the following steps and answer the following questions:
/tmphas enough free space to hold the backups!
/tmpmay be part of your root partition, and it would be a very bad thing to run that out of space. To estimate the size of the backups, calculate the size (used space) of the
/etcdirectories. What command(s) did you use for this? What are the sizes? Note that compressed archives will take about 30% less space. However you will need to store one complete backup of
/homeand two backups of
/etc. What is the estimate of the total space required for your backups?
/”) ran out of space? It pays to create a separate partition or volume for
/tmp. If you have sufficient RAM you could use
tmpfs, a RAM disk designed for
Check now to see if your
/tmp is already a separate volume.
What is the exact command line you ran to check
If you have such a volume, verify the free space available on that volume
is sufficient for your backups.
If you don't have a separate volume for
You have two choices: save the backups there anyway if the root volume
has sufficient space, or create a new LVM volume formatted with
/tmp big enough for you needs.
Note the volume holding
/tmp must be a bit larger than just
the size needed for backups, as other files are stored in there
(and the filesystem itself uses an overhead of around 10%).
/tmpvolume, but also for a backup snap-shot volume, about 20% of the size of the
/homevolume. How much free disk space do you need altogether?
Note, resizing filesystems is a dangerous activity even for
If you need to shrink (for example)
doing so it pays to try to make a
tar archive of just
/home as long as you have sufficient space for that anywhere.
Then, you can proceed to shrink that volume to make room for all your
resize2fscommand. Next you can shrink the logical volume with
Here is a sample of reducing
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02) by 1 gigabyte,
from 10 Gib to 9 GiB:
df -h # show used and available space lvdisplay | less # show lv sizes vgdisplay # show vg free space umount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02 # volume for /home fsck -f /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02 # required before resizing resize2fs -p /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02 9G # shrink filesystem by 1G lvreduce -L -1G /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02 # shrink logical volume by 1G mount /home vgdisplay # Note available space
What are the exact commands you used for this?
/tmpvolume, create a new logical volume and then format it as
ext4. Here is an example of creating a 1 gigabyte volume for
/tmp, using the name
vgdisplay # Note available space lvcreate -n LogVol04 -L 1G VolGroup00 mkfs -t ext4 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04 vi /etc/fstab # add entry for /tmp # Move old /tmp contents to new /tmp partition. This will # likely require a reboot before the new /tmp files get used. mv /tmp /oldtmp mkdir /tmp chmod 1777 /tmp mount /tmp cd /oldtmp cp -a $(/bin/ls -A) /tmp # Do this after the next reboot: rm -ri /oldtmp
findcommand which will find the names of all files and directories in
/etcthat have been modified in the past 24 hours? Make sure the list of names is depth-first (that is, the contents of a directory before the directory itself). What is the purpose of the “
findoption, and why should you use it in a “production-quality” script? What are the matching options for
cpio, to make an archive of the files found by
dump. (Note that the utility name varies with the type of filesystem used. For XFS, it is called
xfsdump.) Use a “level 0” dump. Since we don't want to shut the system down to single user mode (or unmount
/home), we will make an LVM snapshot volume of
/homeand then use
dumpon that. The snap-shot volume typically needs about 15%–20% of the original filesystem's size. How large will you make the
Here is an example of creating, using, then removing an
LVM snap-shot of
/home (in this example
lvcreate --size 100m --snapshot --name home-snap /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 mkdir /mnt/home-snap mount -t auto -o ro /dev/VolGroup00/home-snap /mnt/home-snap dump ... /mnt/home-snap # read the man page for options to use umount /dev/VolGroup00/home-snap lvremove -v /dev/VolGroup00/home-snap rmdir /mnt/home-snap
What are the exact commands you used?
/etcusing a compressed
tararchive. What is the exact command(s) you used for this?
Verify the archive creation was successful, by viewing the (table of) contents of the archive (at least part of it). Does the archive contain absolute or relative pathnames of files?
cpioarchive. Now compress the resulting archive using whichever compression method you used for the
tararchive in the previous step (
xz). What are the exact command(s) you used for this step?
Verify the archive creation was successful, by viewing the (table of)
contents of the archive (at least part of it).
zcat to pipe the compressed archive into
Does the archive contain absolute or relative
pathnames of files?
/etc, and by how much? (Compare compressed to compressed, or uncompressed to uncompressed archives.) Do you think the difference is significant?
MD5checksum and store it in a file
tararchive backup of
/etcalong with the matching
MD5checksum file, to your home directory on the
scpcommand. What is the exact command(s) you used? Before running this command, check your quota on YborStudent and make sure you won't go over your hard limit!
cpioarchive backup of
/etc, along with the matching
MD5checksum file, to your home directory on the
rsynccommand. What is the exact command(s) you used? (Note: by default modern
rsyncuses a secure SSH tunnel, the same as
scp.) Before running this command, check your quota on YborStudent and make sure you won't go over your hard limit!
Describe briefly what the following command does, and list the meaning of each option used in your own words:
rsync -HavRuzc /var/www/html/ example.com:/var/www/html/
YborStudentand verify the integrity of the backup copies, using the
MD5checksum files. What are the exact command(s) to do that, and what were the results?
YborStudent, extract the file “
/etc/group” to your home directory from the
tararchive. Then extract the file “
/etc/hosts” to your home directory from the
cpioarchive. What are the exact commands needed for this? Be careful not to try to extract the absolute pathname or you will attempt to over-write
/etc/group. (Don't worry, you don't have permission to do that!)
pax backup utility is a POSIX
standard tool available on all Unix/Linux platforms.
(Although more popular,
rsync are not standard tools.)
This tool is based on
and can read and write a variety of archive formats.
POSIX has in recent years defined new formats
which in theory can backup ACLs
and extended attributes or “EAs”,
such as used for SELinux.
ustar” format is technically known as the
Standard Data Interchange format.
The successor to
ustar is the
POSIX-1003.1-2001 Standard Data Interchange format, commonly
called the “
pax” archive format.
star archive tool created by
is a nonstandard but widely used tool similar to
but able to handle a wider range of archive types than even the
Taking advantage of the extensible nature of the
format, Jörg has defined the “
with which the
star tool can read/write and which does
backup ACLs and other file meta-data.
star may be the only archiving tool for Fedora which does
pax should, but may not depending on the version).
However, it won't use this format by default!
You must use the correct option(s) to force
For this optional part of the assignment, you should make a full
archive of your home directory using
star, and then
To make this interesting, add some ACLs (with the command
setfacl) and some extended attributes
(with the command
setfattr) to some files first.
After the archives are made, delete those files.
Finally, attempt to restore the files from the archive, including
all attributes (date/time, modes, ACLs, and
Also see if you can recover the
star by using the
What were the exact commands you used?
Were the restore attempts successful?
After reading the man pages (really!), try something similar to the commands used in this star and pax session typescript.
A good site to check for backup hardware is NewEgg.com.
Be careful not to exceed your disk quota while doing this assignment!
If necessary, use the
man (and / or
pages to see how to exclude some directories from the archives when you
create them, and exclude one or more of the larger directories.
(This won't affect the learning benefit from this assignment, but of
course in real life you do need to backup everything.)
/etc/gconf/ and a few other directories in
/etc can be quite large.
You can use
tail, depending on your
sort options) to find the largest few directories
If necessary, copy the
tar archive first, then delete it
before copying over the
A fancy shell script to backup
/etc can be found
Try it using the “
ACLs and EAs only work for some filesystem
ext* types), and then only if the
mount options are used.
Look at the
mount options for
on YborStudent to see an example.
Remember that man pages are not tutorials. You should search online for tutorials on these commands, or for answers to specific questions (for example, cpio extract file with absolute pathname to current directory). Remember that finding answers to such technical questions is a required skill of any system administrator.
A copy of your YborStudent backup policy, and a copy of your journal pages showing the steps you have taken and the answers to the questions for this assignment. Don't turn in your whole journal, you will need to add to it every day in class! It is common in fact to keep the journal as a text file on the system (with a paper backup of course). You can send as email to (preferred). Please see your syllabus for more information about submitting projects.