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Bivac is tool which allows you to backup your containers volumes deployed on Docker Engine, Cattle or Kubernetes. Bivac backups standard volumes but also databases storages (PostgreSQL, MySQL, OpenLDAP, MongoDB).

Architecture

Volumes management

The Bivac manager starts a goroutine which constantly refresh a volume-to-backup list. Every 10 minutes ($BIVAC_REFRESH_RATE), this list is updated by retrieving the volume list from the orchestrator's API. If in the process, a new volume is discovered, Bivac will try to open its remote Restic repository and retrieve the last backup date.

Backup process

The backup process is divided in two steps.

The first step is to detect the data type stored in the targeted volume. For example, if the volume is a PostgreSQL datadir, then we shouldn't backup the raw files but rather a dump of the database.

To address this issue, Bivac detects a volume type based on the providers configuration file (providers-config.default.toml) and can run pre-commands in the container which mounts a volume before backing it up. Keeping the same example, Bivac will execute the pre-command mkdir -p $volume/backups && pg_dumpall --clean -Upostgres > $volume/backups/all.sql and then, only backs up the subdirectory /backups.

The second step is the putting-local-data-to-a-remote-location process.

If and once the pre-commands have been correctly executed, the manager deploys a Bivac agent container via the orchestrator's API. This container mounts the volume to back up and execute the following operations:

• Initialize a remote Restic repository if it doesn't exist.
• Backup the files.
• Cleanup the old snapshots.

Once it's done, the optional post-commands are executed.

If the pre-commands or post-commands fail, Bivac reports the backup as failed.