emergence-backup Installation

emergence-backup runs nightly on the machine you want to backup and uploads snapshots via SSH to a remote disk.

Prerequisites

• Emergence setup and running on a server (the backup target)
• A remote backup server with ample disk space and an SSH login to it with passwordless sudo access (the backup server)

Initial setup of backup server

If this is the first time you're using a backup server with emergence-backup, you'll need to create a configuration file on it that specifies what directory to use for backups. A shell account will be created for each machine being backed up and this directory will serve as the root for their home directories:

/etc/emergence-backup.json

{
	"homePrefix": "/mnt/emergence-backup"
}

Initial setup of backup target

On each machine you want to backup:

1. Install emergence-backup:

   sudo npm install -g git+https://github.com/JarvusInnovations/emergence-backup.git

2. Complete setup wizard to create account on backup server and install cron job:

   sudo emergence-backup-setup

3. Manually trigger initial backup to verify setup:

   sudo emergence-backup

Step 2 installed a cron job under /etc/cron.d/emergence-backup with a random late night time. Feel free to edit to adjust the time.