Backups of the live site

Overview

We have a free, donated account from rsync.net that lets us store 50GB of data there.

We use duplicity (as per the rsync.net official document). We do full backups weekly and incrementals daily. We encrypt these backups.

The only server essential to continued operation of the site is linode.openhatch.org. The other servers do unimportant things that do not keep state. It would be convenient to have backups for them, but it is not essential, so for now I suggest we simply skip it.

Details

We use this script to run backups. It runs via root’s crontab, and emails the results to Asheesh daily.

Restoring

duplicity has a built-in “verify” feature, which checksums the data, but that doesn’t help us ensure that our backup was complete.

Therefore, weekly, we automatically restore and test the virtual machine, via a Jenkins job. http://openhatch.org/bugs/issue530 describes that.

More info about encryption

This backup is encrypted with a GPG key that has been emailed to hello @openhatch.org on Thu, Jan 26.