Backups internals & operations
Off-site backup on a BOA host: a Duplicity-driven subsystem with three orchestrators — multiback, mybackup, and the legacy backboa — each with its own config and gate.
Off-site backup on a BOA host is a Duplicity-driven subsystem with three
distinct orchestrators, each with its own config tree, bucket-name scheme,
and licence gate. This section documents the live interface — the scripts
under /opt/local/bin, the config trees they read, and the cron paths that
fire them — not a generic "how to back up" walkthrough.
The three orchestrators:
multiback— the current root-side engine. Eleven backend keys across nine providers, per-path-set config under/root/.remote_backups/, encryption passphrase from.secret.txt, licence-gated (_tReeset toproordev) via_verify_boa_keys. Installed and wired bydcysetup.mybackup— the tenant-facing front ofmultiback. Restore-only from the lshell side; scheduled backups for tenants are driven by the same root cron path, not by the tenant.backboa/duobackboa— the older single-bucket AWS-S3 tools, configured inline through_AWS_*variables. They ship and run on every host (no licence gate) and remain on the staticcron.dcrontab. Treat them as the legacy path; new hosts use themultiback/dcysetupsuite.
mysql_backup.sh (the nightly per-DB mydumper/mysqldump local dump under
/data/disk/arch/sql/) is the local-restore layer that the off-site tools
archive on top of — covered in Database and cross-linked
where the include/exclude sets reference it.
The pages below cover the subsystem architecture, multiback install and
operations, the retention rules, bucket naming across providers, the full CLI
reference, and the legacy backboa path.
See the Reference appendix for the consolidated variable and command tables, and Discontinued features for tools dropped from the suite.
Backup subsystem overview & architecture
The two generations of off-site backup tooling, the Duplicity layer beneath them, what multiback actually captures, the licence gate, and the backup-binary 755 failure mode.
multiback operations — dcysetup, config tree, cron
dcysetup install and setup, the /root/.remote_backups/ config tree, credential and secret files, the paths.txt variables, the interval cron, and how secrets reach Duplicity.
Backup retention policy
KEEP_WITHIN and FULL_BACKUP_FREQUENCY validation, ranges, and defaults, the time-based cleanup path, the destructive purge distinction, and local-dump retention.
Backup regions, bucket names & target URLs
How multiback builds bucket names and per-backend target URLs deterministically, which providers need a bucket created by hand, and how to test connectivity first.
Backup CLI reference
Exact verb dispatch and argument order for multiback, mybackup, duobackboa, and backboa, including the positional restore arguments and the per-bucket log paths.
Legacy backboa & duobackboa (AWS S3)
The inline AWS-S3 config variables for backboa and duobackboa, the single-bucket scheme, the static crontab schedule, the randomised full-backup day, and cross-host retrieve.