Backups

As with any important information technology system, Bonded Internet data should be backed up on a regular basis. This document describes backup capabilities and procedures.

Core Bonded Internet data

Core data about the Bonded Internet environment includes:

  • SQL database contents—this contains most of the data shown in the web interface, such as aggregators, bonds, legs, speed tests, and users.
  • Private certificate authority (CA)- this includes the CA key/cert and list of issued certificates.
  • Configuration information for applications running on the management server.

Historical performance metrics, used to generate the charts for bonders and aggregators, are not considered core data. For information on how to back up this data, see the “Performance metrics data” section below.

Backup downloads

You can download a Zip file of the most recent daily backup from the backups administration page.

Backup location

Core data is backed up to /var/lib/bondingadmin/backups/.

Backups are performed nightly and old backup files are removed after seven days. One week of backups for a partner with about 100 bonds takes 150-200 MB.

Offsite backups

Partners should back up core data to a remote location no less frequently than once a day. This prevents a storage failure or accidental backup removal from destroying the only backups. There are two ways to perform offsite backups:

  1. Copy the contents of the application backup folder to a remote server. Open-source tools that can perform network backups include scp, rsync, Duplicity, rdiff-backup, and BackupPC. Many proprietary solutions are also available.
  2. For virtual management servers, you can use your normal outside-the-guest VM backup methods. If you back up guest images, the management server image will contain the application backup directory and can be used to restore to a new host.

Offsite backups

As a service, the Bonded Internet vendor provides a nightly offsite backup for most partners’ core data. In general, we download your most recent backup files within 24 hours of the local backup time. However, please consider that we provide no guarantees about this service, and all partners may not be included. Performance metrics are not backed up for any partners.

To confirm if your management server is being backed up by the Bonded Internet vendor’s offsite server, or to disable this service, please submit a support ticket.

Performance metrics data

Bonded Internet management servers collect detailed performance metrics for every bonder, aggregator, and private WAN router, as well as the management server itself. This data is valuable for detecting and determining the cause of performance issues. However, the dataset can become quite large over time and is excluded from the core data backups.

There are two databases containing performance data. The bonding database contains performance data for bonders, aggregators, and private WAN routers and the bondingadmin database contains performance data for the management server.

Backing up

To perform a backup of the data in the bonding database, for example, execute the following command on the management server:

influxd backup -database bonding /tmp/influx-bonding

This will create a directory called /tmp/influx-bonding containing the data. Standard file transfer tools such as rsync or scp can be used to transfer the data to an offsite location.

Restoring

To perform a restore of the backup data for the bonding database, copy the directory to the management server and execute the following commands, assuming the files were placed in /tmp/influx-bonding:

systemctl stop influxdb
influxd restore -datadir /var/lib/influxdb/data/ -database bonding /tmp/influx-bonding
systemctl start influxdb

This will load the backup data into the database.