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Deep Freeze - Yet Another Backup System

deep-freeze backs up files to Amazon S3. By default, it uses the Glacier Deep Archive tier for the cheapest possible storage: the assumption is that we will only rarely restore, for instance in the case of total loss of a disk.

Since deep-freeze cannot read files in Deep Archive quickly and cheaply, backup state is held in an SQLite3 database that should also be backed up.

Installation

  • Clone the repository.
  • Install Python 3.
  • Configure access to an Amazon S3 bucket and set up an appropriate IAM user with AWS CLI access.

Configuration

mkdir ${HOME}/.deep-freeze-backups
<<Create a password/key file, e.g. ${HOME}/.deep-freeze-backups/symmetric_key>>
./create-config.py --cloud-provider=aws \
                   --region=<region name> \
                   --aws-profile=<AWS CLI user profile> \
                   --bucket=<target bucket name> \
                   --client-name=<host name> \
                   --backup-root=<path to back up> \
                   --key-file=${HOME}/.deep-freeze-backups/symmetric_key

Ensure the key file is backed up somewhere safe, e.g. a password manager.

(A future version will support the use of public key encryption for improved security.)

Run

./deep-freeze.py

Processes all configured backups in turn.

Scheduled runs

To set up a launchd job that will attempt to run backups hourly if:

  • on AC power,
  • Internet access is available,
  • and the last successful backup is at least 24h old

Edit install/[CHOOSE_A_REVERSE_FQDN_PREFIX].deep-freeze.plist, fill out placeholders and save in ~/.deep-freeze-backups, then:

cd ~/Library/LaunchAgents
ln -s ~/.deep-freeze-backups/[CHOOSE_A_REVERSE_FQDN_PREFIX].deep-freeze.plist
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/[CHOOSE_A_REVERSE_FQDN_PREFIX].deep-freeze.plist

To start the job manually:

launchctl start [CHOOSE_A_REVERSE_FQDN_PREFIX].deep-freeze

Restoring files from backup

Identify archives for a file to restore and generate the commands to restore the relevant S3 objects from Glacier (restore-object), monitor progress (head-object) of the restore and copy the file (cp):

deep-freeze-restore.py --client-name $(hostname) --backup-root $(pwd) --target "relative_path_to_file_to_restore"
  • Trigger the restore from Glacier.
  • Check for completion, it will take a few hours.
  • Copy the restored object locally.
  • Decrypt the archive: gpg -d x.tar.gz.enc > x.tar.gz.
  • Untar the archive, extracting the desired file: tar xzf x.tar.gz --strip-components=<Y> -C <destination> "relative_path_to_file"

Exclusions (experimental)

Files/directories can be excluded from backups: exclusions are defined using regexp patterns.

Exclusions are currently added through DML statements issued against the database directly, there is no helper CLI yet. For example:

sqlite3 -echo -header ~/.deep-freeze-backups/deep-freeze-backups.db \
    "insert into backup_client_configs_exclusions(client_fqdn, backup_root, pattern) values ('test-host', '${test_root}', '/a1/excluded_directory2/.*')"

Evolution

It’s likely exclusions will evolve in a non-backward-compatible way once Python 3.13 is available, bringing support for recursive wildcards in pathlib.PurePath.match(). This syntax would simplify UX.