Scrub¶

Scrubbing backups is needed to ensure data consistency.

$ backy2 scrub --help
usage: backy2 scrub [-h] [-s SOURCE] [-p PERCENTILE] version_uid

positional arguments:
  version_uid

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s SOURCE, --source SOURCE
                        Source, optional. If given, check if source matches
                        backup in addition to checksum tests. url-like format
                        as in backup.
  -p PERCENTILE, --percentile PERCENTILE
                        Only check PERCENTILE percent of the blocks (value
                        0..100). Default: 100

Why scrubbing is needed¶

backy2 backs up data in blocks. These blocks are referenced from the metadata store. When restoring images, these blocks are read and restored in the order the metadata store says. As backy2 also does deduplication, an invalid block could potentially create invalid restore data on multiple places.

Invalid blocks can happen in these cases (probably incomplete):

Bit rot / Data degradation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation
Software failure when writing the block for the first time
CPU bug on backy2 server or target storage
human error: deleting or modifying blocks
backy2 software errors

What scrubbing does¶

There are different scrubbing modes:

Target-only¶

When calling:

backy2 scrub <version_uid>

backy2 reads block-metadata (UID and checksum) from the metadata store, reads the block by it’s UID from the target storage, calculates its checksum and compares the checksums.

Backup Source based¶

When calling scrub with a source like:

backy2 scrub -s <snapshot> <version_uid>

backy2 also reads the backup source for this version. This means that backy2 reads the block metadata (UID, position and checksum), reads the corrosponding source data block, the target block, calculates the checksum of both, compares these checksums to the stored one and compares the source- and data-block byte for byte.

This is not necessarily slower, but it will of course create some load on the source storage, whereas target-only scrub only creates load on the target storage.

What scrubbing does not¶

modify block-data, so it does not:
fix filesystem errors in backed-up images
check any logic inside blocks
replay journals or fix database files

When scrub finds invalid blocks¶

If either scrubbing mode finds invalid blocks, these blocks are marked invalid in the metadata store. However, such blocks will persist and not be deleted.

Also, the versions affected by such invalid blocks are marked invalid. Such versions cannot be the base (i.e. backy2 backup -f, see Differential backup) for differential backups anymore (backy2 will throw an error if you try).

However, invalid versions can still be restored. So a single block will not break the restore process. Instead, you’ll get a clear log output that there is invalid data restored.

You can find invalid versions by looking at the output of backy2 ls:

$ backy2 ls
    INFO: $ /home/dk/develop/backy2/env/bin/backy2 ls
+------+------+---------------+------+------------+-----+-------+-----------+------+
| date | name | snapshot_name | size | size_bytes | uid | valid | protected | tags |
+------+------+---------------+------+------------+-----+-------+-----------+------+
| …    | …    | …             | …    |          … | …   |   0   |     …     |      |
+------+------+---------------+------+------------+-----+-------+-----------+------+
    INFO: Backy complete.

Invalid versions are shown with a 0 in the column valid, valid versions are shown with a 1 in this column.

Note

Multiple versions can be affected by a single block as backy2 does deduplication and one block can belong to multiple versions, even to different images.

Partial scrubs¶

If scrubbing all your backups creates too much load or takes too long, you can use the -p parameter from backy2. With this parameter, backy2 performs a partial scrub. It will statistically (i.e. by random) choose the given percentage of existing blocks in the version and scrub only these.

So if you call:

backy2 scrub -p 15 <version_uid>

each day for each version, you’ll have statistically scrubbed 105% of all blocks after seven days.