New settings handling

The major change with server 2.5.x and client 2.5.x is a complete redesign how settings are handled. The goal is to make it more explicit and consistent.

Each setting has a button next to it which switches between inheriting the setting from the group, using the configuration value on the configuration page and using the value from the client, and for some setting merging client and server settings together

File backup paths are now a normal setting just like any other. No more separation between paths to backup configured on the client and default directories to backup

This is a critical area of UrBackup and as such needs a lot of testing. Focus should be on if the 2.4.x client still more or less works with the 2.5.x server (and especially doesn’t loose its connection settings for Internet servers).

Linux image backups

2.5.x can backup Linux clients (via dattobd only). The use case is e.g. backing up a DigitalOcean instance. It is explicitly not to create image backups of all possible configurations e.g. LVM, mdraid, btrfs, …

It can “live restore” a root volume, i.e., overwrite the root volume of a currently running machine. So one can image backup e.g. a DigitalOcean droplet. To restore create a new instance (tested with Debian 10/buster) then run the restore script which overwrites the current instance with the backed up instance using a trick to put the currently running system files into (compressed) memory.

Dattobd supports Changed Block Tracking (CBT), so image (and file) backups are done with CBT.

Linux image backup howto

Backup:

Install dattobd https://github.com/datto/dattobd/blob/master/INSTALL.md

To only backup used space install partclone (e.g. apt install partclone ). This is currently supported for ext* and xfs. If partclone is not present it’ll backup unused space.

). This is currently supported for ext* and xfs. If partclone is not present it’ll backup unused space. Install the (binary) client and select dattobd for snapshotting

Restore:

On the server browse to the image backup to restore

Click on “Restore Linux image”

Copy & paste the command into a new instance and follow the instructions (the command has a timeout (token), so after a while it should not work anymore)

Testing (image backup + file backup with CBT)

To test if CBT works correctly with file backups please enable Debugging: Verify file backups using client side hashes (for Internet clients with client-side hashing) or Debugging: End-to-end verification of all file backups in the advanced settings.

To test image backups enable md5sums creation on the client via touch /usr/local/var/create_md5sums_imagebackup . The client will then create a file (with date+time in the name) at /usr/local/var/md5sums-* for each image backup listing all files in the image plus their md5sum. Copy that file to server, mount the image backup then verify the md5sums with cd /backup/client/image_mnt; md5sums --quiet -c /path/to/md5sums-file.txt . The only files with checksum errors should be the .datto-* / .overlay-* files in the root directory and swap files (those get automatically excluded from backup).

Thanks for any help with testing and feedback!

Upgrade process

As always: Replace the executables (via the installers) and the database of the server/client will be updated on first running it.

Place the files from the update directory into C:\Program Files\UrBackupServer\urbackup or /var/urbackup to auto-update clients. Disable Download client from update server in the server settings to prevent the server from downloading the current version.

On Linux e.g. with this update script: https://github.com/ptempier/get_urbackupclient/blob/master/updateclient.sh

Downgrade process (server)

Stop the UrBackup server, restore C:\Program Files\UrBackupServer\urbackup or /var/urbackup from a backup before upgrade and then install the previous version over the beta release.

Changes with server 2.5.1 beta

Changes to support (limited) Linux image backups

Fixes to new settings handling

Upgrade to Visual Studio 2019

Use getrandom instead of reading from /dev/urandom if possible

Return error message if authentication key is empty

Fix check if image backup is already queued

Handle “all_nonusb” setting in image snapshot group

Fix storing alert state when serialization has null bytes

Fix backup_dirs_optional display + saving

Substract sparse extents before checking if file fits on storage

Upgrade miniz

Fix polish language name

Setting to only allow access to settings after the user enters a text

Add option to send mail SSL encrypted (without STARTTLS)

Changes with client 2.5.1 beta

Changes to support (limited) Linux image backups

Upgrade to Visual Studio 2019

Use getrandom instead of reading from /dev/urandom if possible

Fix rare race condition that makes indexing hange after reconnect

Changes with server 2.5.0 beta

Rework settings handling

Changes with client 2.5.0 beta

Rework settings handling

Downloads