Freezer-getting-started

Getting Started with Freezer

Freezer is a Backup and Restore as a Service tool that helps you automate the backup and restore process for your data. Freezer executes backups and restores as jobs, and executes these jobs independently and/or as managed sessions (multiple jobs in multiple machines sharing a state).

Freezer features:

• Multiplatform: Linux, Windows, *BSD, OSX.
• Snapshots in Linux using LVM and on Windows using VSS.
• Encryption using AES-256-CFB.
• Low storage consumption: backups and restores are treated as streams.
• Flexible backup policy (both incremental and differential).
• Multiple compression algorithm support (zlib, bzip2, xz).
• Remove old backup automatically according the provided rules.
• Multiple storage media support (Swift, local file system, SSH).
• Remove old backup automatically according the provided parameters.
• Manage multiple jobs (multiple backups on the same node).
• Flush kernel buffered memory to disk.
• Manage multiple jobs (i.e. multiple backups on the same node).
• Synchronize backups and restore on multiple nodes.
• Web user interface integrated with OpenStack Horizon.
• Can execute scripts/commands before or after a job execution

Actions

An action is the simplest execution of freezer, it could be a backup, a restore or an admin task.

An example of a backup using the agent:

 freezer-agent --action backup --backup-name my_backup --storage swift --container my_backup_container

An example of an action as an INI file saved as **/tmp/my_backup.ini**

 [default]
 action = backup
 backup_name = my_backup
 storage = swift
 container = my_backup_container

Then we can use the ini file like this:

 freezer-agent --config /tmp/my_backup.ini

An action can be represented as command line arguments or as an INI file.

Jobs

A job is a wrapper around a single or multiple actions that will be excecuted by a client and it contains scheduling information for recurrent executions.

A job can be represented as a json file.

Create a backup job in /tmp/job_backup.conf

 {
   "job_actions": [
    {
            	"freezer_action": {
            	"mode" : "mysql",
            	"mysql_conf" : "/etc/mysql/debian.cnf",
            	"path_to_backup": "/var/lib/mysql/",
            	"backup_name": "freezer-db-mysql",
            	"snapshot": true,
            	"always_level": 1,
            	"max_priority": true,
            	"remove_older_than": 90,
            	"container": "freezer_backup_devstack_1_alwayslevel".
            	"storage": "swift"
        	},
        	"max_retries": 5,
       	"max_retries_interval": 60,
        	"mandatory": true
        	}
    	],
    	"job_schedule" : {
    	},
    	"description": "mysql backup"
  }

Sessions

A group of jobs which share the same scheduling time, this is really helpful to sync backups across multiple nodes.

Clients

A client is an agent/scheduler running in a host.