README

Chronos Database Backup and Restore provides easy and painless backups of your MySQL, Postgres and Sqlite databases.

Each process, wether dumping, compression or encryption is handled by the specific binary application and then the relevant extension is appened to the output filename. For example, chronos does not compress using gpg nor encrypt with 7zip. This means the trail on how backups were created can easily be followed, and thus can be unpacked without chronos, if needed.

Requirements

mysqldump if you are going to backup MySQL databases
pgdump if you are going to backup Postgres databases
gpg,openssl if you want to encrypt/decrpyt data
bzip2,gzip,7zip or zip executable binaries if you want to compress backups

Installation

To install this package

$ composer require jamielsharief/chronos

Create a folder where you will store your backups, and set the permissions so you can write to it, assuming you are a member of the www-data group, for example

$ mkdir /backups
$ chown www-data:www-data /backups
$ chmod 0775 /backups

Usage

First you need to initialize your installation which creates chronos.json in your project folder with the database settings.

$ vendor/bin/chronos init
          __                               
    _____/ /_  _________  ____  ____  _____
   / ___/ __ \/ ___/ __ \/ __ \/ __ \/ ___/
  / /__/ / / / /  / /_/ / / / / /_/ (__  ) 
  \___/_/ /_/_/   \____/_/ /_/\____/____/

version 0.1.0

Starting chronos initialization
Engine  (mysql/postgres/sqlite) [mysql]
> mysql

Host [localhost]
> mysql

Port [3306]
> 3306

Username [root]
> root

Password
> 

Backup directory
> /backups/crm

Enter the default database name to backup.
Database name
> 

[ OK ] chronos.json saved

Are you installing on a server with multiple applications? if so it could be be a good idea to setup a folder within your backup folder for each application , e.g. /backups/crm, /backups/helpdesk

If you provided a default database during setup, then you can simply run the backup command and this will backup up the database(s) listed in chronos.json, if there are no databases configured then chronos will show you a list of databases asking you yo choose one.

$ vendor/bin/chronos backup

If you didnt or want to backup different databases then you can pass the database names as arguments.

$ vendor/bin/chronos backup bookmarks
          __                               
    _____/ /_  _________  ____  ____  _____
   / ___/ __ \/ ___/ __ \/ __ \/ __ \/ ___/
  / /__/ / / / /  / /_/ / / / / /_/ (__  ) 
  \___/_/ /_/_/   \____/_/ /_/\____/____/

version 0.1.0

[ OK ] Backup 'bookmarks'

Took 0.06 seconds

You can also backup multiple databases at the same time

$ vendor/bin/chronos backup crm helpdesk accounting

To use compression, simply supply the compression type 7zip, bzip2, gzip, unzip or zip.

$ vendor/bin/chronos backup --compress gzip

To encrypt your backups using AES you can use gpg or ssl which uses openssl.

$ vendor/bin/chronos backup --encrypt gpg # this will ask for password
$ CHRONOS_PASSWORD=secret vendor/bin/chronos backup crm --encrypt gpg # uses password from env var

To list backups

$ vendor/bin/chronos backup list
          __                               
    _____/ /_  _________  ____  ____  _____
   / ___/ __ \/ ___/ __ \/ __ \/ __ \/ ___/
  / /__/ / / / /  / /_/ / / / / /_/ (__  ) 
  \___/_/ /_/_/   \____/_/ /_/\____/____/

version 0.1.0

Backups path: /backups/bookmarks
+----------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+
| Date                 | Backup                               | Size     |
+----------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+
| 2021-01-16 14:11:15  | bookmarks-20210116141115.sql.7z.gpg  | 1.48 KB  |
| 2021-01-16 14:10:56  | bookmarks-20210116141056.sql.gpg     | 4.23 KB  |
| 2021-01-16 14:10:46  | bookmarks-20210116141046.sql.zip     | 1.53 KB  |
| 2021-01-16 14:10:42  | bookmarks-20210116141042.sql         | 4.21 KB  |
+----------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+

To restore a backup

$ vendor/bin/chronos restore bookmarks-20210116132550.sql.bz2
          __                               
    _____/ /_  _________  ____  ____  _____
   / ___/ __ \/ ___/ __ \/ __ \/ __ \/ ___/
  / /__/ / / / /  / /_/ / / / / /_/ (__  ) 
  \___/_/ /_/_/   \____/_/ /_/\____/____/

version 0.1.0

 WARNING   Database 'bookmarks' already exists
Existing data will be overwritten, continue?  (yes/no) [no]
> yes

[ SKIPPED ] Create database 'bookmarks'
[ OK ] Restore 'bookmarks' from 'bookmarks-20210116132550.sql.bz2'

Took 1.22 seconds

If you want to restore the backup to a different database than from what it was created

$ vendor/bin/chronos restore bookmarks-20210116132550.sql.bz2 <different-name>

When restoring backups, if the file is encrypted it will prompt you for a password.

Compression

Backups can be compressed using using bzip2,gzip,7zip and zip.

Depending upon your linux distribution you might need to install the relevant binary. For brevity I have put all compression packages in one line, however you can install just the one or ones that you want.

Ubuntu/Debian

$ apt install bzip2 zip gzip p7zip-full

For Redhat/CentOS/Fedora

7zip packages are in the EPEL repository and needs to be enabled install

$ yum install bzip2 zip gzip p7zip p7zip-plugins

If a dump is compressed, the filename will be appened with bz2,gz,7z or zip.

Compression Comparison

I carried out a simple test using a single table with 1,000 and 10,000 records with random data.

This is how I generated the data

$post = $this->Post->new([
    'title' => uniqid(), // random 13 char string
    'body' => Security::hex(16), // random 16 char string
    'published' => rand(0, 1)
]);

These are the results that I got

                1,000       10,000
sql             76.42 KB    770.76 KB
bzip2           18.93 KB    147.25 KB
gzip            18.93 KB    185.42 KB    
zip             19.12 KB    185.52 KB
7zip            13.97 KB    133.31 KB

Encryption

Encryption is carried out after compression to be effective, however it some cases it could become less secure due to side channel attacks.

GPG (recommended)

NASA recommend using GPG for file encryption, and this is easily installed on linux operating systems (if not already)

For Ubuntu/Debian

$ sudo apt install gnupg

For Redhat/CentOS/Fedora

$ sudo yum install gnupg

OpenSSL (deprecated)

Use GPG instead

To use this encryption engine, you need openssl to be installed, this is already on linux systems, but on the Mac libressl is included but that does not support does not support pbkdf2 or iter. Both these features improve security and should be used.

Encrypting data is touchy with openssl because the settings used to encrypt needs to same when decrypting, therefore you can't be encrypting data on different installations in different ways. Major changes to openssl could affect backup/restore operations.

On the MacOS you can install openssl simply like this

$ brew update
$ brew install openssl

If a dump is encrypted with openssl it will have the enc extension added.

jamielsharief / chronos

Maintainers

Details