toglacier

Send data to the cloud periodically.

What?

Have you ever thought that your server could have some backup in the cloud to mitigate some crazy ransomware infection? Great! Here is a peace of software to help you do that, sending your data periodically to the cloud. For now it could be the Amazon Glacier or the Google Cloud Storage services. It uses the AWS SDK and Google Cloud SDK behind the scenes, all honors go to Amazon developers and Google developers.

The program will first add all modified files (compared with the last sync) to a tarball and then, if a secret was defined, it will encrypt the archive. After that, if AWS was chosen, it will decide to send it in one shot or use a multipart strategy for larger files. For now we will follow the AWS suggestion and send multipart when the tarball gets bigger than 100MB. When using multipart, each part will have 4MB (except for the last one). The maximum archive size is 40GB (but we can increase this).

Old backups will also be removed automatically, to avoid keeping many files in the cloud, and consequently saving you some money. Periodically, the tool will request the remote backups in the cloud to synchronize the local storage.

Some cool features that you will find in this tool:

• Backup the desired directories periodically;
• Upload only modified files (small backups parts);
• Detect ransomware infection (too many modified files);
• Ignore some files or directories in the backup path;
• Encrypt backups before sending to the cloud;
• Automatically download and rebuild backup parts;
• Old backups are removed periodically to save you some money;
• List all the versions of a file that was backed up;
• Smart backup removal, replacing references for incremental backups;
• Periodic reports sent by e-mail.

Install

To compile and run the program you will need to download the Go compiler, set the $GOPATH, add the $GOPATH/bin to your $PATH and run the following command:

go get -u github.com/rafaeljusto/toglacier/...

If you are thinking that is a good idea to encrypt some sensitive parameters and want to improve the security, you should replace the numbers of the slices in the function passwordKey of the encpass_key.go file for your own random numbers, or run the python script (inside internal/config package) with the command bellow. Remember to compile the tool again (go install).

encpass_key_generator.py -w

As this program can work like a service/daemon (start command), in this case you should run it in background. It is a good practice to also add it to your system startup (you don't want your backup scheduler to stop working after a reboot).

Usage

The program will work with environment variables or/and with a YAML configuration file. You can find the configuration file example on cmd/toglacier/toglacier.yml, for the environment variables check bellow:

Amazon cloud credentials can be retrieved via AWS Console (My Security Credentials and Glacier Service). You will find your AWS region identification here. For Google Cloud Storage credentials, check the Service Account Keys. If you chose Google Cloud Storage, you will need to create the project and the bucket manually.

By default the tool prints everything on the standard output. If you want to redirect it to a log file, you can define the location of the file with the TOGLACIER_LOG_FILE. Even with the output redirection, the messages are still written in the standard output. You can define the verbosity using the TOGLACIER_LOG_LEVEL parameter, that can have the values debug, info, warning, error, fatal or panic. By default the error log level is used.

There are some commands in the tool to manage the backups:

• sync: execute the backup task now
• get: retrieve a backup from AWS Glacier service
• list or ls: list the current backups in the local storage or remotely
• remove or rm: remove a backup from AWS Glacier service
• start: initialize the scheduler (will block forever)
• report: test report notification
• encrypt or enc: encrypt a password or secret to improve security

You can improve the security by encrypting the values (use encrypt command) of the variables TOGLACIER_AWS_ACCOUNT_ID, TOGLACIER_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, TOGLACIER_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, TOGLACIER_BACKUP_SECRET and TOGLACIER_EMAIL_PASSWORD, or the respective variables in the configuration file. The tool will detect an encrypted value when it starts with the label encrypted:.

For keeping track of the backups locally you can choose boltdb (BoltDB) or auditfile in the TOGLACIER_DB_TYPE variable. By default boltdb is used. If you choose the audit file, as it is a human readable and a technology free solution, the format is defined bellow. It's a good idea to periodically copy the audit file or the BoltDB file somewhere else, so if you lose your server you can recover the files faster from the cloud (don't need to wait for the inventory). If you change your mind later about what local storage format you want, you can use the toglacier-storage program to convert it. Just remember that boltdb format stores more information than the auditfile format.

[datetime] [vaultName] [archiveID] [checksum] [size] [location]

The [location] in the audit file could have the value aws or gcs depending on the cloud service used to store the backup.

When running the scheduler (start command), the tool will perform the actions bellow in the periodicity defined in the configuration file. If not informed default values are used.

• backup the files and folders;
• remove old backups (save storage and money);
• synchronize the local storage;
• report all the scheduler occurrences by e-mail.

A shell script that could help you running the program in Unix environments (using AWS):

#!/bin/bash

TOGLACIER_AWS_ACCOUNT_ID="encrypted:DueEGILYe8OoEp49Qt7Gymms2sPuk5weSPiG6w==" \
TOGLACIER_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="encrypted:XesW4TPKzT3Cgw1SCXeMB9Pb2TssRPCdM4mrPwlf4zWpzSZQ" \
TOGLACIER_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="encrypted:hHHZXW+Uuj+efOA7NR4QDAZh6tzLqoHFaUHkg/Yw1GE/3sJBi+4cn81LhR8OSVhNwv1rI6BR4fA=" \
TOGLACIER_AWS_REGION="us-east-1" \
TOGLACIER_AWS_VAULT_NAME="backup" \
TOGLACIER_PATHS="/usr/local/important-files-1,/usr/local/important-files-2" \
TOGLACIER_DB_TYPE="boltdb" \
TOGLACIER_DB_FILE="/var/log/toglacier/toglacier.db" \
TOGLACIER_LOG_FILE="/var/log/toglacier/toglacier.log" \
TOGLACIER_LOG_LEVEL="error" \
TOGLACIER_KEEP_BACKUPS="10" \
TOGLACIER_CLOUD="aws" \
TOGLACIER_BACKUP_SECRET="encrypted:/lFK9sxAXAL8CuM1GYwGsdj4UJQYEQ==" \
TOGLACIER_MODIFY_TOLERANCE="90%" \
TOGLACIER_IGNORE_PATTERNS="^.*\~\$.*$" \
TOGLACIER_SCHEDULER_BACKUP="0 0 0 * * *" \
TOGLACIER_SCHEDULER_REMOVE_OLD_BACKUPS="0 0 1 * * FRI" \
TOGLACIER_SCHEDULER_LIST_REMOTE_BACKUPS="0 0 12 1 * *" \
TOGLACIER_SCHEDULER_SEND_REPORT="0 0 6 * * FRI" \
TOGLACIER_EMAIL_SERVER="smtp.example.com" \
TOGLACIER_EMAIL_PORT="587" \
TOGLACIER_EMAIL_USERNAME="user@example.com" \
TOGLACIER_EMAIL_PASSWORD="encrypted:i9dw0HZPOzNiFgtEtrr0tiY0W+YYlA==" \
TOGLACIER_EMAIL_FROM="user@example.com" \
TOGLACIER_EMAIL_TO="report1@example.com,report2@example.com" \
TOGLACIER_EMAIL_FORMAT="html" \
toglacier $@

With that you can just run the following command to start the scheduler:

./toglacier.sh start

Just remember to give the write permissions to where the stdout/stderr and audit files are going to be written (/var/log/toglacier).

Deployment

For developers that want to build a package, we already have 2 scripts to make your life easier. As Go can do some cross-compilation, you can build the desired package from any OS or architecture.

Debian

To build a Debian package you will need the Effing Package Management tool. Then just run the script with the desired version and release of the program:

./package-deb.sh <version>-<release>

FreeBSD

You can also build a package for the FreeBSD pkgng repository. No external tools needed here to build the package.

./package-txz.sh <version>-<release>

Windows

To make your life easier you can use the tool NSSM to build a Windows service to run the toglacier tool in background. The following commands would install the service:

c:\> nssm.exe install toglacier

c:\> nssm.exe start toglacier