If you’ve never heard of Mondo, I’m not surprised. Mondo is a Linux backup program designed to be reliable, easy and comprehensive – which all backup suites should be. Here are some excerpts from the about page:

… backs up your GNU/Linux server or workstation to tape, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R[W], DVD+R[W], NFS or hard disk partition. … you will be able to restore all of your data, from bare metal if necessary. Mondo is in use by Lockheed-Martin, Nortel Networks, Siemens, HP, IBM, NASA’s JPL, the US Dept of Agriculture, …

Mondo supports LVM 1/2, RAID, ext2, ext3, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, VFAT, UFS, and can support additional filesystems easily: … software raid as well as most hardware raid controllers. … Mondo runs on all major Linux distributions … You may even use it to backup non-Linux partitions, such as NTFS.

Mondo is free! It has been published under the GPL v2 (GNU Public License), …

A few of things you might have noticed there:

1. Mondo is a Linux backup program. I stated this before, but I want to make sure all the Windows users out there know what they’re missing. You can use Mondo to backup a Windows-only workstation, but that’s another post too.
2. Large companies (probably larger than you deal with) use this software. You probably don’t have the resources to test every configuration that you’ll run into, but they most likely have.
3. This is FREE software. Everyone will know before long that I’m a huge proponent of free software. Best of all, should you need commercial support, it’s there!

Now, let’s get started.

I’m going to assume your distribution already has Mondo in their repositories or that you already know how to download and install a package. If not, maybe I’ll cover that in another post. I’ll also assume that you can read documentation and that you can figure out the command-line options for Mondo. The intention of this post is to help you automate Mondo so you can use it for a daily backup.

My particular need of this solution came at the time a client’s 10/20 Travan drive failed, and the purchase of a new one combined with maintenance of tapes was more than finding a modern solution. I had used Mondo once before to backup up my own personal system before moving to a larger drive, so I had some experience with it.

I know very little about BASH scripting, just enough to get myself in trouble, so if there are huge glaring errors in my script, feel free to point them out in the comments and I will feel free to ignore them as I rewrite the script in Perl. I called my script makemondobackup; inventive I know.

#!/bin/bash

#Setup some static variables
DATABASE=/etc/mondo/database
MNT_POINT=/backup
SCRIPT=”MMBK”
TMPDIR=/tmp/makemondo.$RANDOM

#Functions
function logOut() {
echo -n $SCRIPT” ”
echo -n $(date +%H%M%S)”: ”
echo $1
}

# Check for the old log. I don’t think it appends, but why take the chance.
if [ -f /var/log/mondo-archive.log ]; then
logOut “Deleteing old mondo-archive.log”
rm -f /var/log/mondo-archive.log
else
logOut “Old mondo-archive.log does not exist”
fi

# Mount the drive if not mounted.
MNT_INFO=$(mount | awk -v mnt=$MNT_POINT ‘{ if ($3 == mnt) print $0 }’)
#’ To fix sysntax coloring in mc
if [ "$MNT_INFO" == "" ]; then
logOut “/backup Not Mounted”
mount /dev/sda1 /backup
else
logOut “/backup Mounted”
fi
MNT_INFO=$(mount | awk -v mnt=$MNT_POINT ‘{ if ($3 == mnt) print $0 }’)
#’ To fix sysntax coloring again in mc
if [ "$MNT_INFO" == "" ]; then
logOut “/backup Still Not Mounted. Something went wrong.”
exit
fi

# What backup device are we using?
VOLUME=`ls $MNT_POINT | grep -i “Volume_”`

#logrotate -f /etc/mondo/mondologrotate
# Count the number of previous backups on the drive, looking for directories beg
inning with “20″
MYBACKUPS=(`ls $MNT_POINT | grep “^20″ | sort`)
logOut “I found ${#MYBACKUPS[*]} backups”
while [ ${#MYBACKUPS[@]} -gt 6 ]; do
logOut “Too many backups, deleting oldest ${MYBACKUPS[0]}”
rm -rf /backup/${MYBACKUPS[0]}
# sed ‘/${MYBACKUPS[0]}/ d’ > “$DATABASE.tmp”
grep -v ${MYBACKUPS[0]} $DATABASE > “$DATABASE.tmp”
mv -f $DATABASE “$DATABASE.bak”
mv -f “$DATABASE.tmp” $DATABASE
MYBACKUPS=(`ls $MNT_POINT | grep “^2″ | sort`)
done

# Name for backup folder
DATE=$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)
# Create the temp and backup directories
logOut “Creating $TMPDIR”
mkdir $TMPDIR
logOut “Creating /backup/$DATE”
mkdir /backup/$DATE

# Actual mondoarchive command
# -Oi = create iso files
# -d = where to backup to
# -E = Exclude these directories
# -S -T = Temp dirs
# -p = prefix for iso files
# -0 = compression level [0-9]
# -F = do not write floppy images
CMDTORUN=”mondoarchive -Oi -d /backup/$DATE -E /backup -S $TMPDIR -T $TMPDIR -0
-F -p $HOSTNAME”
logOut “Executing: $CMDTORUN”
touch /backup/$DATE/mondo-run.log
$CMDTORUN 2>&1 > /backup/$DATE/mondo-run.log

# Check the exit code to see if everything went OK
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
logOut “We didn’t exit correctly. Not cleaning up $TMPDIR.”
else
logOut “Good exit. Cleaning up $TMPDIR.”
rm -rf $TMPDIR
logOut “Adding $DATE $VOLUME backup to $DATABASE”
#Write the backup info to the database
echo “$DATE $VOLUME” >> $DATABASE
fi

# Finally copy the backup script and other necessities
mkdir /backup/$DATE/etc
cp -rf /etc/mondo/* /backup/$DATE/etc
mkdir /backup/$DATE/images
cp -rf /root/images/* /backup/$DATE/images
cp /var/log/mondo-archive.log /backup/$DATE

# Email the report. Don’t need to do this now.
#mailx -s “server-$DATE” nunya@biznes.com < /backup/$DATE/mondo-archive.log

#Unmount the drive
umount /backup

My script requires a few things to be setup that the next version will automatically take care of. First, we expect the external drive to be sda1; if this is different on your system, change the mount line. Second, we expect each external drive to have a “label” (a file indicating what Volume number it is), so you have to label each drive by hand. Third, I expect you are allowing Mindi (Mondo’s cousin) to run so that we have bootable CD images that are copied to the backup. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t, but people do odd things. Fourth, the file database must be created as the script will probably crash horribly without it. Lastly, everything should be placed in /etc/mondo as that was the arbitrary place I decided they should go.

The script takes care of mounting the drive (if it’s not already mounted), creating the backup directory on the external drive, running mondoarchive (the actual Mondo backup command), cleaning up after and unmounting the drive so the someone can change them out. It also copies the log file if everything went ok, and leaves it where it is, if it didn’t. I’ve left my numerous comments in, hopefully they help you understand my original design.

I run the script using a single cronjob, saved in /etc/cron.d and called mondo, detailed here:

# Regular cron job for backup

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

# Every day at 7:30p
0 19 * * 1-5 root test -x /etc/mondo/makemondobackup && /etc/mondo/makemondobackup | mailx -s “Backup Run Log” nunya@biznes.com
#

Obviously, you want to change the email address for the logs to go to; poor Nunya has enough logs to read on his own. Don’t forget an empty line at the end of your cronjob. You will spend many hours trying to figure out why you script doesn’t run.

If you are monitoring backups for your clients, check your logs every morning. If you didn’t get a log, find out why. I recently picked up a client whose previous consultant let them get 30 days behind on backups. They didn’t find out until they had a drive failure. It is going to happen. Drive failure is a “when”, not an “if.” Your clients will respect you so much more if they can recover quickly.

I love Linux for the simple fact that anything difficult can be made simple. I have run about three months of backups using this script and test about every other week. I have had yet to have a backup fail or fail to restore.

My hope is that this script and Mondo can help you automate those servers that aren’t getting regular backups; there are far too many of them out there. External drives are cheap folks, make your backups.