XS backup restore

Goals

• Simple, efficient (minimise processing, traffic), quick dev turnaround, debuggable
• Sane, fail-safe, atomic-ish
• Independent of the actual storage strategy (DS-agnostic)
• And yet, it must work well with the current DS (as of April 2008), and avoid restricting the evolution of the DS
• Safe for XO and XS
• The server can refuse to backup due to traffic/load
• Simple version negotiation
• Supports full homedir restore
• Supports per-document restore (via journal and/or webbased)
  • There is some interest in leveraging a webbased 'document restore' facility as 'async document share/publish' mechanism.

Notes

• All timestamps are integers representing seconds elapsed since the UNIX epoch.
• There is a REST meta-protocol versioning scheme. Outside of that initialcheck, what this page describes is the version "1" of the backup/restore protocol.

XO-initiated backup

XO side

1. Issue a HTTP GET to XS with path 
  /backup/<protocol version>/available/<this_XO_serial_number>
  
  <protocol version> is the integer representing the latest
  backup protocol version supported by this XO. In protocol version 1,
  a successful reply consists of a single integer:
  
      timestamp -- timestamp of latest backed up item for this user                                    
                   or 0 if there are no previous backups

  If the sent protocol version is not supported by the school server,
  it will return a 404 not found error, whose only body contents is 
  a comma-separated list of integers representing the backup protocol
  versions supported by this school server.

  If this school server refuses to provide backup service for this XO,
  it will return a 403 forbidden error.

  If the school server is too busy to deal with the XO's backup request,
  it will return a 503 service unavailable error. The XO will sleep 5
  minutes and retry.


2. If the request in step 1 succeeded, go to step 3. Otherwise, 
  if none of the backup system versions on the XO (multiple may be
  present) are in the 'versions' variable listed in the 404 error, abort
  until next scheduled backup time (we cannot back up to this XS). If
  a version was returned that also exists locally, go back to step 1
  and use that protocol version.

3. Write out all the metadata for all the documents available for
  backup, in CanonicalJSON format. Save it as metadata.json
  overwriting (atomically) any previously existing version.

4. Run rsync-over-ssh between the datastore and a remote directory
  called datastore-current/ in the user's home directory on
  the XS.

  The remote datastore-current directory will have a complete set of files
  so use the rsync facilities available to optimise the transfer and 
  delete stale files:

   --times
   --partial (to make retries faster)
   --delete
 
  Check the exit value from rsync. If non-zero, retry up to 3 times.
  If still non-zero, abort until next backup.

5. Store the epoch of the end time of step 4.

Note: This backup scheme is not atomic. Users of the backed-up data must be prepared for slightly inconsistent state between metadata and files - a large window exists between steps 3 and 5. Solutions to this could come from the FS (a ZFS-like implementation) or from a higher-level layer (a git-based DS for example).

XS side

On the school server, when getting a request for /backup/<protocol version>/available/<SN>:

1. Check if we support the protocol version. If not, return 404 and a list
  of supported versions. Otherwise, proceed.

2. Check if we know this machine (can find it in our registration DB on
  the XS). If not, return 403. We will not offer it backup service.
  Check if we're too busy to process another concurrent backup (e.g.
  based on transfer rate or number of rsync processes), if so, return
  503.
 
3. Check if backups for this machine exist. In protocol version 1, if
  backups don't exist, let timestamp be 0. Otherwise, find the
  timestamp of the last backed-up object for this machine and return
  it.

4. Check system and network load metrics - can we offer service to this
  client?


5. Return timestamp in the body of a 200 OK
  response.

When the rsync-over-ssh connection comes in, we need to have an rsync wrapper script that will

1. Establish a lock using flock to prevent overlaps

2. Cleanup/sanitise parameter list to rsync

3. Upon successful completion, set a success flag

XS maintenance

• A regular cronjob checks for recent success flags. Home directories that are marked as successfully backed up will be 'shadowed' with a hardcopy script similar to pdumpfs.
  • It might be a good idea to spot partial/failed backups and checkpoint/shadow them anyway. If our handling of inconsistent data is reasonably good, a partial backup might be a passable data source for per-document restores.
• A low-freq cronjob runs hardlink.py
• A cronjob removes old pdumpfs snapshots

XO-initiated full restore

XO side

1. Issue a HTTP GET to the XS with path
  /backup/<protocol version>/restore/<this_XO_serial_number>

  The response is 0 or a single absolute path on the XS, pointing to
  the location of this XO's backup files in the backup hierarchy. If
  the response is 0, abort and report to user; there are no backups
  to restore. Otherwise store the path variable for future use.

  If the request returns a 500, abort and report to user that they
  must pick out restore files individually from the web interface.

  If the request returns a 503, wait 1 minute, then retry step 1,
  otherwise proceed.

2. rsync the directory provided in step 1, restoring mode and
  times. Retry 3 times; if still failing, abort restore and
  report to user.

  (Do we need to remove the fetched files in case of a dropped
  rsync? rsync guarantees we won't get partial files in place, so
  it is reasonably safe, and makes retries "incremental". As long
  as the metadata is restored only once step 2 succeeds, the Journal
  should be ok...)

3. Rebuild the metadata in Xapian, based on the metadata.json file
  that should have been restored by rsync in #2. Might make sense
  to apply some checks. 

  Mainly: do the files named by the metadata file exist?

  The race conditions that exist during the backup generation mean that
  the document may have changed or vanished after the metadata was created.
 
4. We have succeeded with the restore. Inform
  user. Eat some ice cream. Dance salsa

XS side

On the school server, when getting a request for /backup/<protocol version>/restore/<SN>:

1. Check if we support the protocol version. If not, return 404 and a list
  of supported versions. Otherwise, proceed.

2. Check if backups for this machine exist. If not, return 200 OK whose
  only body contents is 0. Otherwise, proceed.

3. Check for system and network traffic load metrics. Return 503 for "not now".

4. Find the latest complete backup - it should be the most recent directory
   following this format in the home directory for the laptop: 

   ~/datastore-YYYY-MM-DD

  Note: 'Most recent' should be intepreted on the parsed datestamp from the
  directory name, not the FS ctime/mtime.

  Return the directory path in a '200' response.