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Backup and Restore

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rsiddall edited this page Jul 27, 2017 · 1 revision

Backup and Restore for BigBlueButton (BBB)

After installing a BigBlueButton (BBB) installation, you'll need to backup and restore system it.

Objectives

The backup system should:

  • run daily and backup all required files except the operating system and BBB 1.0 standard files: - the development files - any customized BBB components - meeting recordings - banned word lists
  • perform a weekly full backup and daily incremental backup.
  • An administrator should be able to perform disaster recovery in less than an hour.

Approach

This backup system uses "duplicity", a differential backup program. This backs up files to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) or other preferred location. (We'll assume S3 from now on.) "duply", a wrapper around duplicity, is used to simplify performing backups and restores. (Both duplicity and duply are pre-packaged for Ubuntu.)

For disaster recovery, the script automating the BBB 1.0 install instructions can be used on a clean replacement system. This allows creation of a working BBB install in less than an hour.

If you use a customized version of BBB, after standard BBB has been installed a BBB development environment can be installed using the script to automate setting up development tools. After that, the ~/dev folder for the standard user account is restored from S3 using duply, along with customized BBB files (restored to /var/bigbluebutton, etc.) and files for custom word lists and meeting recordings.

In order to bring up a replacement system, the administrator will need:

  1. An Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit system with at least 4GB of RAM.

  2. An SSL certificate matching the system's FQDN.

  3. The S3 credentials used for backup.

  4. The duply profile used for backup.

Enhancements

Disaster recovery could be sped up using several approaches, but these are not yet supported:

  1. Building a Debian package for FFMPEG takes a considerable amount of time. This can be build separately and saved. When disaster recovery is performed, the saved FFMPEG package can be installed and then the BBB installer script run and instructed not to build FFMPEG.

  2. Disaster recovery can be performed before disaster strikes, and the system image of the resulting working BBB clone can be saved. When this is done on cloud service platforms like Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, Linode, etc., the saved image can be used to create a working virtual machine in a few minutes when disaster recovery is needed. The administrator would need to perform a restore of the latest backup to update the saved image, as well as applying security updates and checking that the SSL/TLS certificate was still valid. Creation of images, as well as creation of virtual machines from those images, and updating the images, can all be automated. (Potentially, a virtual machine can be created from the saved image daily, updated with the latest backup, and then imaged and destroyed.)

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