How I backup my server configs with lsyncd

In the event that something happens to my server, or one of the services running on my machine, I like to have a backup of my config for that particular service. Ain’t nothing worse than taking hours or even days to properly configure a service to have a hard drive crash, operating system got corrupted, an update replaced your config file with the default or maybe you accidentally deleted the config or made some mistakes modifying it. This post shows how i use lsyncd and logrotate to automatically sync my /etc directory on my server with a remote machine and use logrotate to create and rotate 2 backup copies of the /etc directory.

The machines involved are main_server and backup_server. Read more

PostgreSQL Backup and Recovery with Barman

dbRecently a friend pointed me in the direction of a rather useful piece of software for doing quite funky things with backing up and restoring PostgreSQL databases.

Most organizations I have seen using PostgreSQL and MySQL have always chosen to perform database backups locally on each server. This is fine and it works, but you need to ensure you take a backup of those backup files. I’ve not come across any piece of software that will do complete database backups remotely… that is, until now. This is where “barman” fits in. You can check out what they are all about on the project’s website. http://www.pgbarman.org/

In this article I’ll be going through a really quick howto on getting up and running with Barman in order to perform remote backups of postgresql servers.

In this example I will be using the below details. Read more