There’s a great deal of documentation, but i’m a bit lost on how to achieve this, so i asked ChatGPT the following question:
“How do i configure urbackup to keep 2 yearly backups, 12 monthly backups, 4 weekly backups, and 7 daily backups?”
And it replied this:
Here’s how you can get exactly 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly and 2 yearly restore points using UrBackup’s Archiving feature:
Open the UrBackup Web UI and go to Settings → Archiving.
Click Add to create your first rule:
Archive every:1Days
Keep for:7Days
Click OK.
Click Add again for your weekly retention:
Archive every:1Weeks
Keep for:4Weeks
OK.
Repeat for monthly:
Archive every:1Months
Keep for:12Months
OK.
And finally for yearly:
Archive every:1Years
Keep for:2Years
OK.
Then i asked:
“how do i configure client backups for this”
And it replied with:
1. Ensure daily backups
In the UrBackup Web UI go to Settings → File Backups (or Image Backups if you’re backing up images).
Under Backup schedule, add a schedule line like this (or edit the default):
Days between backups:1
Type: Incremental
Start time: e.g. 02:00
This guarantees that each client will send one incremental backup every 24 hours, so you’ll have something for your “archive every 1 day; keep 7 days” rule to pick from.
2. Schedule one full backup per week
Still under Settings → File Backups → Backup schedule, click Add.
Enter:
Days between backups:leave empty
Days of week: check e.g. Sunday
Type: Full
Start time: e.g. 03:00
Save.
This makes each client do exactly one full backup every week.
3. Schedule one full backup per month
Again under Backup schedule, click Add.
Enter:
Days of month:1
Type: Full
Start time:04:00
Save.
You’ll now get one full backup on the 1st of every month.
4. Schedule one full backup per year
Under the same Backup schedule table, click Add.
Enter:
Days of month:1
Months:1
Type: Full
Start time:05:00
Save.
That gives you a full backup once a year (January 1st).
To me this seems to be correct, are there others who do it like this? I am hosting my own fediverse servers for friends and family, and i want to have a good backup in place
@jhjacobs81 it’s better to have screenshots of your setup.
For example:
Keep 6-7 Incremental backups with interval 24h and schedule: Mon-Sat/0-8,18-24
Do full backup each Sun: Sun/0-8,18-24
To have 1 image per week for last 4 weeks: Archive: create 4 archive items for full backups: 1) 0;1;0;0 2) 0;7;0;0 3) 0;14;0;0 4) 0;21;0;0 where 1,7,14,21 - days of month, archive them for 2 weeks.
To have 12 monthly: archive each 0;1;0;0 for 365 days.
To have 2 yearly: archive for 730 days.
Actually what you want to achieve have good thought from one side but realization can have significant troubles related to huge period time you trying to embrace and the storage size will be huge as well. I can recommend to do full backup each Sat/Sun. do fast incrementals during workdays, to be able recover each day for last 2 weeks than have archive each 1st + 2nd week of month. Then if you want to have recovery point per month for last 2 years this is technologically different task: archiving, and it’s better to use solutions like s3 immutable storage (but urBackup can’t), or Tape storage. In case of urBackup I can recommend to have 2 servers with different scheduling: 1st for daily/weekly backups and 2nd as long term.
My experience with urBackup: make backup object/source as small as possible, keep no more than 10-15 incrementals per full backup, backup no more than 50-60 systems per urBackup server, keep total backup storage under 50-60Tb.
About hardware: my recommended minimum 4 CPU, 16Gb memory, storage as RAID 6 atleast 4 SATA HDD drives on raid controller with redundant cache module, it’s enough to maintain up to 20 systems on 30-40Tb backup storage.
Best experience: 16-20 CPU, 64-128GB memory, BTRFS as regular backup storage up to 100Tb (take a look on 16-24Tb 4Kn drives) storage RAID6 with hardware SSD cache 1-2Tb (256K chunk size) and with 256-512Gb SSD RAID1 for example to keep btrfs metadata: mkfs.btrfs -m single -d single /dev/sdb /dev/sdc, 10Gbps network (LACP 10+10).
