Upgrade

Metadata

Upgrading backy2 is done within backy2. Usually you don’t have to do anything as backy2 handles upgrades (metadata and backup data) by itself. Still, here are some details on the process.

After upgrading, whenever backy2 is called with any command, backy2 checks the metadata version of your database and starts an upgrade process if necessary.

Note

Under the hood backy2 uses alembic for the hard work on the metadata store.

You may upgrade backy2 even while jobs are running. The next job will upgrade (and block!) the database until the upgrade is done. So the here’s the recommended process:

  1. Let all jobs finish, don’t start new ones.

  2. Run backy2 ls and wait until the upgrade is done (no output will be produced).

PostgreSQL

We use postgresql ourselves in our datacenter and therefore postgresql migrations are very well tested. Usually there should be nothing else to do for postgresql metadata storage on upgrades.

sqlite

We do not test upgrades on sqlite. Especially as sqlite does not support alter table for existing columns these upgrades may fail. However the failure should not touch or even destroy your backup data. It will just throw an exception and exit.

The recommended process for sqlite upgrades is:

  1. Export all your backups via backy2 export

  2. Move your sqlite database away (i.e. start freshly)

  3. Import all your exports again

mysql

We have not tested backy2 with mysql. Upgrade procedures like with sqlite should work however.

Backup data

backy2 can upgrade your backup data (i.e. blocks) on demand. This can happen the first time on backy2 V. 2.12.1 as encryption and compression have been introduced.

If you set encryption_version: 0 into your backy.cfg file, nothing will change. If you set encryption_version: 1 (and a corrosponding encryption_key), backy2 will store new blocks encrypted and compressed but will leave old blocks untouched. So only newly stored data will be encrypted.

Please note especially that deduplication will continue to use old, i.e. unencrypted blocks.

If you want to use encryption and compression you will need to migrate your data to encrypted blocks. See Migrating to the next encryption version.

Note

This works because the encryption version is stored in each block’s metadata along with the encryption key.