Taken directly from the vendors website, Holland is an Open Source backup framework originally developed at Rackspace and written in Python. Its goal is to help facilitate backing up databases with greater configurability, consistency, and ease. Holland is capable of backing up other types of data, too. Because of its plugin structure, Holland can be used to backup anything you want by whatever means you want.
Notable Features
– Pluggable Framework
– Supports Multiple Backup Sets
– Database and Table Filtering (Using GLOBs)
– Auto-Detection of Transactional DBs
– Safe use of –single-transaction with mysqldump
– In-Line and Pluggable Compression
– Backups Suitable for Point-In-Time Recovery / Replication
– MySQL + LVM Snapshot and Logical Backups
– PostgreSQL backups using pgdump
Website: http://hollandbackup.org
Documentation: http://docs.hollandbackup.org
How to install Holland on Ubuntu / Debian
As the packages don’t exist in the distro’s repositories, pull them from the official repositories.
This works on the followings OS’s:
– Ubuntu 12.04
– Ubuntu 14.04
– Ubuntu 14.10
– Ubuntu 16.04
– Debian 7
– Debian 8
You can setup the repo by running the following on the commandline as root:
eval $(cat /etc/os-release)
DIST="xUbuntu_${VERSION_ID}"
[ $ID == "debian" ] && DIST="Debian_${VERSION_ID}.0"
curl -s http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/holland-backup/${DIST}/Release.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/holland-backup/${DIST}/ ./" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/holland.list
Then install Holland:
apt-get update apt-get install holland holland-mysqldump holland-common
How to install Holland on CentOS and RedHat
The holland packages exist in the EPEL repositories. Using the list below, install the EPEL repo for your distro:
# CentOS 5 / RedHat 5 rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm # CentOS 6 / RedHat 6 rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm # CentOS 7 / RedHat 7 rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm
Then install Holland by:
yum install holland holland-mysqldump holland-common
How to configure Holland
Now that Holland is installed, its now time to configure it.
First create the backup directory where you will be storing your database backups:
mkdir -p /var/lib/mysqlbackup
Then configure holland to store the backups in the directory created above:
vim /etc/holland/holland.conf ... backup_directory = /var/lib/mysqlbackup backupsets = default ...
Next we setup default backupset within Holland that will control the retention period, compression, credentials, etc:
cat << EOF > /etc/holland/backupsets/default.conf ## Default Backup-Set ## ## Backs up all MySQL databases in a one-file-per-database fashion using ## lightweight in-line compression and engine auto-detection. This backup-set ## is designed to provide reliable backups "out of the box", however it is ## generally advisable to create additional custom backup-sets to suit ## one's specific needs. ## ## For more inforamtion about backup-sets, please consult the online Holland ## documentation. Fully-commented example backup-sets are also provided, by ## default, in /etc/holland/backupsets/examples. [holland:backup] plugin = mysqldump backups-to-keep = 7 auto-purge-failures = yes purge-policy = after-backup estimated-size-factor = 1.0 # This section defines the configuration options specific to the backup # plugin. In other words, the name of this section should match the name # of the plugin defined above. [mysqldump] file-per-database = yes #lock-method = auto-detect #databases = "*" #tables = "*" #stop-slave = no #bin-log-position = no # The following section is for compression. The default, unless the # mysqldump provider has been modified, is to use inline fast gzip # compression (which is identical to the commented section below). [compression] method = gzip options = "--rsyncable" [mysql:client] defaults-extra-file = /root/.my.cnf EOF
In order for Holland to backup the databases, setup the /root/.my.cnf by running:
cat << EOF > /root/.my.cnf [client] user=root password=your_root_mysql_password_here EOF
Now setup the nightly cronjob that will run Holland:
cat << EOF > /etc/cron.d/holland 30 3 * * * root /usr/sbin/holland -q bk EOF
Finally, run the backup job to ensure Holland works. Please note this will lock your tables when it runs, so do not run this during peak times as it could cause downtime for your site or application!
/usr/sbin/holland -q bk
You can verify Holland ran successfully by checking the logs:
tail -f /var/log/holland/holland.log 2015-12-16 03:58:01,789 [INFO] Wrote backup manifest /var/lib/mysqlbackup/default/20151216_035801/backup_data/MANIFEST.txt 2015-12-16 03:58:01,793 [INFO] Executing: /usr/bin/mysqldump --defaults-file=/var/lib/mysqlbackup/default/20151216_035801/my.cnf --flush-privileges --max-allowed-packet=128M --lock-tables mysql 2015-12-16 03:58:01,888 [ERROR] /usr/bin/mysqldump[25783]: -- Warning: Skipping the data of table mysql.event. Specify the --events option explicitly. 2015-12-16 03:58:01,888 [INFO] Final on-disk backup size 181.77KB 2015-12-16 03:58:01,889 [INFO] 26.47% of estimated size 686.67KB 2015-12-16 03:58:01,889 [INFO] Backup completed in 0.24 seconds 2015-12-16 03:58:01,902 [INFO] Purged default/20151209_035801 2015-12-16 03:58:01,902 [INFO] 1 backups purged 2015-12-16 03:58:01,909 [INFO] Released lock /etc/holland/backupsets/default.conf 2015-12-16 03:58:01,909 [INFO] --- Ending backup run ---
Holland Tips and Tricks
Below are some of the more common tips and tricks for working with Holland. There are broken down as follows:
1. Alternate username for Holland
2. Change Default Retention
3. Hourly Backups
4. Backing up 2 or more database servers
1. Alternate username for Holland
For security purposes, a client may want to have a user, other then root, performing the Holland backups. To configure this, first create a new MySQL user for Holland:
mysql GRANT SELECT, RELOAD, SUPER, LOCK TABLES, REPLICATION CLIENT, SHOW VIEW ON *.* TO 'holland_backup'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'secretpassword'; flush privileges;
Now update /etc/holland/backupsets/default.conf to reflect the new credentials:
vi /etc/holland/backupsets/default.conf ... [mysql:client] # defaults-file = /root/.my.cnf user = holland_backup password = secretpassword ...
2. Change Default Retention
This guide sets Holland to keep 7 backups of your databases. Please note that this does not mean 7 days as it makes the assumption that you are only running one Holland backup job each night.
With that said, if you wanted to configure a retention of 14 days, you would update “backups-to-keep” in /etc/holland/backupsets/default.conf as shown below:
vi /etc/holland/backupsets/default.conf ... [holland:backup] plugin = mysqldump backups-to-keep = 14 auto-purge-failures = yes ...
3. Hourly Backups
You can configure Holland to be more aggressive with how often it runs. Assuming we have a MySQL Slave server with a small database, and we want
– Holland backups every 4 hours
– 7 day retention
You would first update the cronjob as follows:
vi /etc/cron.d/holland 30 */4 * * * root /usr/sbin/holland -q bk
Now update the “backups-to-keep” in /etc/holland/backupsets/default.conf to keep 42 backups (6 backups a day * 7 days) as shown below
vi /etc/holland/backupsets/default.conf ... [holland:backup] plugin = mysqldump backups-to-keep = 42 auto-purge-failures = yes ...
4. Backing up 2 or more database servers
An environment may have two or more database servers. Perhaps they exist on another server, or perhaps they are using something like Rackspace Cloud Database, or Amazon RDS. Below is how you can configure Holland to backup multiple targets:
First, create a copy of the default.conf we configured in this guide to serve as a starting point:
cd /etc/holland/backupsets/ cp default.conf clouddatabase.conf
Now update the clouddatabase.conf to configure the remote database server IP and credentials. You must comment out the defaults-extra-file as shown below:
vim clouddatabase.conf ... [mysql:client] #defaults-extra-file = /root/.my.cnf # define external database information host = xxxxxxxxx.rackspaceclouddb.com user = holland password = your_holland_mysql_password_here port = 3306 ...
Now update your retention settings:
vi /etc/holland/backupsets/clouddatabase.conf ... [holland:backup] plugin = mysqldump backups-to-keep = 7 auto-purge-failures = yes ...
Finally, update the holland.conf to include your second config file:
vim /etc/holland/holland.conf ... backupsets = default, clouddatabase ...
Finally, run the backup job to ensure Holland works. Please note this will lock your tables which it runs, so do not run this during peak times as it could cause downtime for your site or application!
/usr/sbin/holland -q bk