Administration

Benji is an important tool when it’s responsible for keeping backups of your important data. Backups, scrubs, restores and cleanups must run smoothly and need to be monitored closely. Also, the database backend and the collection of data storages need to meet your availability requirements.

Securing Version Metadata

This section shows methods of how to keep version metadata safe even when disaster happens.

Backups and Exports

Benji already writes a backup of a version’s metadata to the same storage as the block data automatically. This backup can be restored with benji metadata-restore:

The database-less restore option also uses this backup to facilitate restores even when the database is unavailable. Please see section Restoring without a database.

Further copies of the version metadata can be made with benji metadata-export. These exports can be stored somewhere safe and later be restored with benji metadata-import.

Note

It is advisable to compress the exports as the JSON export format is quite redundant.

Note

A version’s metadata can only be imported if a version with the same version UID does not exist in the database, yet.

Attention

When you remove (benji rm) versions from the database and then call benji cleanup, the blocks containing the backed up data will be removed from storage. No benji metadata-import can bring them back, because Benji’s metadata exports only contain information on how to assemble the blocks and not the block data themselves.

Database High-Availability

An additional option against data loss is to replicate the SQL database. Please refer to the database documentation. You should also have a regular database backup in place.

Caution

DBMS replication only helps in the case when one server crashes or has a failure. It does not help against software-bug related data loss or human error. So the automatic metadata backup and benji metadata-export are the only reliable options for long-term data safety.

Securing Block Data on Storages

It is advisable for a storage to be redundant and highly available. Most cloud providers have an SLA which guarantees a certain level of availability. If the storage is self-managed, look into the redundancy and high-availability options it provides like:

• RAID 1, 5 and 6

• Redundancy options provided by distributed object stores like Ceph or Minio

• DRBD

• Data redundancy and replication mechanisms in filesystems like Btrfs or ZFS

If a storage fails or is affected by data corruption, at best corrupted or incomplete restores are possible.

Benji also supports multiple storages so a backup can be made to more then one storage, so providing a level of redundancy.

Monitoring

General Advise

• If anything goes wrong Benji exists with a non-zero exit code. Make sure to catch and report this is your scripts.

• Benji writes all output including possible stack traces and command lines to the configured logfile (see Configuration). If anything goes wrong, you’ll be able to visit this logfile and hopefully get enough information to troubleshoot the problem.

• Starting Benji with --log-level DEBUG will increase the log level on the console as well.

• You should also monitor the status of existing backups with commands like benji ls 'status != "valid"'. Versions with a status of incomplete are normal while a backup is in progress.

• Benji also changes to process name to indicate what it is currently doing.

Machine output

Some commands can produce machine readable JSON output for usage in scripts:

INFO: $ /home/lf/src/backy2/venv/bin/benji -m ls
{
  "versions": [
    {
      "uid": 1,
      "date": "2019-09-27T18:05:21.936087Z",
      "name": "test",
      "snapshot": "",
      "size": 692241,
      "block_size": 4194304,
      "storage_id": 1,
      "status": "valid",
      "protected": false,
      "bytes_read": 692241,
      "bytes_written": 692241,
      "bytes_dedup": 0,
      "bytes_sparse": 0,
      "duration": 0,
      "labels": {
        "label-1": "bla",
        "label-2": "blub"
      }
    }
  ],
  "metadata_version": "2.0.0"
}

Note

Take care to put the -m between benji and ls.

All messages emitted by Benji are written to STDERR. In contrast the machine readable output is written to STDOUT.

Here’s a table of commands supporting machine readable output and their output:

Command	Description of output
ls	List of matching versions
backup	List of newly create version
enforce	List of removed versions
scrub	List of scrubbed versions and of versions with errors
deep-scrub	List of scrubbed versions and of versions with errors
batch-scrub	List of scrubbed versions and of versions with errors
batch-deep-scrub	List of scrubbed versions and of versions with errors

jq is an excellent tool for parsing this data and filtering out the bits you want. Here’s a short example, but see the scripts/ and images/benji-k8s/scripts/ directories for more:

$ benji -m ls | jq -r '.versions[0].date'
2018-06-07T12:51:19