AFS Backups

AFS backups are done through the AFS backup daemon. See the AFS administrator's guide for details on how this works.

butc screen

We usually run a butc through a root screen session on persephone. To see if it's running, do "sudo screen -r" on persephone and see if it's there. You should run it with 'butc -localauth' so that its tokens won't expire.

Currently, we have "backup" running in the same screen as "butc" is. To access it, log in to persphone and "sudo screen -r". One of the windows (ctrl+a 0) is butc, the other (ctrl+a 1) is backup. This way, we can run scheduled jobs so we don't have to remember to log in every day and run them.

You can see all the dumps in a hierarchical form by using the script /afs/.ugcs/ugcs-admin/sysadmin-utils/dumptree. /OffSiteQuarterly is for tapes that will go in the data vault, and /quarterly is for stuff that stays on-site. I try to keep quarterly and monthly backups on one tape, and then rotate out other tapes for weekly backups. You can run backups by running:

backup (this gets you into the interactive backup shell
dump homes /quarter/month#/week#/<day> (look in dumptree to see what the current month/week are)
dump admin /quarter/month#/week#/<day>
<ctrl+c to quit the shell>

/afs/.ugcs/ugcs-admin/sysadmin-tools/make-backup-schedule.py is a script that will generate the backup lines to do daily dumps. Pass it the month number and week number as arguments.

When backups are running, you can check their status in persephone:/var/lib/openafs/backup/T[EL]_st0

Restores

To restore a volume:

1. Pick the volumes (or volume set if things really went to hell)
2. Pick which dump you want to use. Use "dumptree" to pick the dump. You will need the date of the dump to restore it.
3. Pick the server and partition to restore to.
4. Decide if you want to overwrite the old volume. If you don't, you need to give an "-extension" argument to "backup volrestore". It is usually not a good idea to overwrite stuff, only skip this part if you are recovering from a massive systems failure.
5. Find what tapes you need. Run

backup volrestore -volume <vol> -server server -partition partition -extension restore -date mm/dd/yyyy -n

1. Find the tapes, and then run the job (run the above command without -n). You will have to have the "butc" window open so you can press enter after you have loaded the appropriate tapes.