In today’s data-driven world, having a robust backup and restore strategy is essential for every business. Whether you’re protecting critical databases, application files, or infrastructure configurations, the right tools can ensure your data is safe from loss, corruption, or disaster. Open-source tools are valuable in this process, providing powerful, flexible, and cost-effective solutions to manage backup and restore operations across different environments. This post will explore nine must-know open-source tools that can streamline your backup and restore efforts.

1. Restic

Restic is an open-source backup tool that focuses on simplicity and security. It allows users to back up their data to various backends, including cloud storage services like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure. Restic uses encryption to ensure that your data is secure, and its de-duplication feature reduces storage costs by minimizing duplicate data in backups.

2. Bacula

Bacula is a mature open-source backup solution that supports network-wide backups for various platforms. It is highly scalable and suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises. Bacula provides scheduling, automation, and cataloging features and can back up data to both disk and tape. It’s known for its reliability and extensive community support. Bacula also supports backups in Kubernetes.

3. Duplicity

Duplicity is a command-line backup tool that encrypts and compresses backups. It supports incremental backups, making it efficient in terms of storage and network usage. Duplicity works with various storage backends, including local storage, FTP servers, and cloud services like Amazon S3 and Google Drive. With its built-in encryption, Duplicity ensures that your backups remain secure.

4. Amanda

Amanda (Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) is an open-source backup tool for managing multiple server backups. It simplifies the backup process by allowing administrators to set up a master backup server to back up data from different clients on a network. Amanda supports various platforms and works with disk, tape, and cloud storage options for backup.

5. Rclone

Rclone is an open-source command-line program that manages files and backups in cloud storage services. It can be used to synchronize files and directories from your local machine to remote storage platforms like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Amazon S3. Rclone’s flexibility and support for encryption make it a popular tool for cloud-based backups.

6. UrBackup

UrBackup is a client/server backup solution that provides both file and image backups. It is designed to minimize the impact on system performance while ensuring reliable backups. UrBackup allows you to back up multiple systems simultaneously, making it ideal for organizations with multiple endpoints. It also supports both local and cloud backups for added flexibility.

7. BorgBackup

BorgBackup (Borg) is an efficient and secure deduplicating backup tool. It compresses and encrypts backups while allowing for fast restores. BorgBackup is known for its excellent deduplication capabilities, which reduce the size of backups and save storage costs. It is ideal for users who need fast and secure backups for large amounts of data.

8. Velero

Velero is an open-source backup and restore solution specifically designed for Kubernetes clusters. It allows you to back up and restore Kubernetes resources and persistent volumes. Velero supports on-demand backups, scheduled backups, and disaster recovery, making it a valuable tool for teams running Kubernetes-based applications.

9. Timeshift

Timeshift is a powerful open-source backup tool for Linux systems, primarily focused on system restore. It creates snapshots of your system at regular intervals, allowing you to roll back your system to a previous state in case of issues. Timeshift is particularly useful for Linux desktops and servers, ensuring quick recovery from failed updates or configuration changes.

How Simplyblock Enhances Your Backup and Restore Strategy?

While traditional backup tools provide basic data protection, modern storage platforms, such as simplyblock, enable advanced techniques to protect your data against data loss, data center outages, and even threats like ransomware attacks.

• Immutable Backup Protection with instant snapshots, data center replication, volume-level point-in-time recovery, and more.
• Zero-Time Recovery Time Objective with multi-site and cross-availability zone recovery for your whole infrastructure.
• Enterprise-Grade Data Protection with volume- and cluster-level encryption and full multi-tenant isolation.

How to Optimize Backup and Restore with Open-source Tools

This guide explored nine essential open-source tools for backup and restore operations, from Restic’s secure backups to Velero’s Kubernetes protection. While these tools excel at different aspects – Bacula for network-wide backups, BorgBackup for deduplication, and Timeshift for system snapshots – proper implementation is crucial. Tools like Duplicity enable encrypted backups, while UrBackup and Amanda provide comprehensive client-server solutions. Each tool offers unique approaches to data protection and recovery.

Simplyblock offers comprehensive solutions that integrate seamlessly with these tools to further streamline your backup and restore processes, helping you create a reliable and efficient backup strategy.

Ready to take your backup and restore operations to the next level? Contact Simplyblock today to learn how we can help you simplify and enhance your data protection journey.

The post Best Open Source Tools for Backup and Restore appeared first on simplyblock.

For environments with high-performance requirements such as transactional databases, where low-latency access and optimized storage costs are key, alternative solutions are essential. This is where simplyblock steps in, offering a new way to manage storage that addresses common pain points in traditional EBS or local NVMe disk usage—such as limited scalability, complex resizing processes, and the cost of underutilized storage capacity.

What is Simplyblock?

Simplyblock is known for providing top performance based on distributed (clustered) NVMe instance storage at low cost with great data availability and durability. Simplyblock provides storage to Linux instances and Kubernetes environments via the NVMe block storage and NVMe over Fabrics (using TCP/IP as the underlying transport layer) protocols and the simplyblock CSI Driver.

Simplyblock’s storage orchestration technology is fast. The service provides access latency between 100 us and 500 us, depending on the IO access pattern and deployment topology. That means that simplyblock’s access latency is comparable to, or even lower than on Amazon EBS io2 volumes, which typically provide between 200 us to 300 us.

To make sure we only provide storage which will keep up, we test simplyblock extensively. With simplyblock you can easily achieve more than 1 million IOPS at a 4KiB block size on single EC2 compute instances. This is several times higher than the most scalable Amazon EBS volumes, io2 Block Express. On the other hand, simplyblock’s cost of capacity is comparable to io2. However, with simplyblock IOPS come for free – at absolutely no extra charge. Therefore, depending on the capacity to IOPS ratio of io2 volumes, it is possible to achieve cost advantages up to 10x .

For customers requiring very low storage access latency and high IOPS per TiB, simplyblock provides the best cost efficiency available today.

Why Simplyblock over Simple Amazon EBS?

Many customers are generally satisfied with the performance of their gp3 EBS volumes. Access latency of 6 to 10 ms is fine, and they never have to go beyond the included 3,000 IOPS (on gp2 and gp3). They should still care for simplyblock, because there is more. Much more.

Benefits of Thin Provisioning

With gp3, customers have to pay for provisioned rather than utilized capacity (~USD 80 per TiB provisioned). According to our research, the average utilization of Amazon EBS gp3 volumes is only at ~30%. This means that customers are actually paying more than three times the price per TiB of utilized storage. That said, due to the low utilization below one-third, the actual price comes down to about USD 250 per TiB. The higher the utilization, the closer a customer would be to the projected USD 80 per TiB.

In addition to the price inefficiency, customers also have to manage the resizing of gp3 volumes when utilization reaches the current capacity limit. However, resizing has its own number of limitations in EBS it is only possible once every six hours. To mitigate potential issues during that time, volumes are commonly doubled in size.

On the other hand, simplyblock provides thin provisioned logical volumes. This means that you can provision your volumes nearly without any restriction in size. Think of growable partitions that are sliced out of the storage pool. Logical volumes can also be over-provisioned, meaning, you can set the requested storage capacity to exceed the storage pool’s current size. There is no charge for the over-provisioned capacity as long as you do not use it.

That said, simplyblock thinly provisions NVMe volumes from a storage pool which is either made up of distributed local instance storage or gp3 volumes. The underlying pool is resized before it runs out of storage capacity.

These means enable you to save massively on storage, while also simplifying your operations. No more manual or script-based resizing! No more custom alerts before running out of storage.

Benefits of Storage Tiering

But if you feel there should be even more potential to save on storage, you are absolutely right!

The total data stored on a single EBS volume has very different access patterns. Let’s explore together what the average database setup looks like. The typical corporate’s transactional database will easily qualify as a “hot” storage. It is commonly stored on SSD-based EBS volumes. Nobody would think of putting this database to slow file storage stored on HDD or Amazon S3.

In reality, however, data that belongs to a database is never homogeneous when it comes to performance requirements. There is, for example, the so-called database transaction log, often referred to as write-ahead log (WAL) or simply a database journal. The WAL is quite sensitive to access latency and requires a high IOPS rate for writes. On the other hand, the log is relatively small compared to the entire dataset in the database.

Furthermore, some other data files store tablespaces and index spaces. Many of them are read so frequently that they are always kept in memory. They do not depend on storage performance. Others are accessed less frequently, meaning they have to be loaded from storage every time they’re accessed. They require solid storage performance on read.

Last but not least, there are large tables which are commonly used for archiving or document storage. They are written or read infrequently and typically in large IO sizes (batches). While throughput speed is relevant for accessing this data, access latency is not.

To support all of the above use cases, simplyblock supports automatic tiering. Our tiering will place less frequently accessed data to either Amazon EBS (st2) or Amazon S3, called warm storage. The tiering implementation is optimized for throughput, hence large amounts of data can be written or read in parallel. Simplyblock automatically identifies individual segments of data, which qualify for tiering, and moves them automatically to secondary storage, and only after tiering was successful, cleaning them up on the “hot” tier. This reduces the storage demand in the hot pool.

The AWS cost ratio between hot and warm storage is about 5:1, cutting cost to about 20% for tiered data. Tiering is completely transparent to you and data is automatically read from tiered storage when requested.

Based on our observations, we often see that up to 75% of all stored data can be tiered to warm storage. This creates another massive potential in storage costs savings.

How to Prevent Data Duplication

But there is yet more to come.

The AWS’ gp3 volumes do not allow multi-attach, meaning the same volume cannot be attached to multiple virtual machines or containers at the same time. Furthermore, its reliability is also relatively low (indicated at 99.8% – 99.9%) compared to Amazon S3.

That means neither a loss of availability nor a loss of data can be ruled out in case of an incident.

Therefore, additional steps need to be taken to increase availability of the storage consuming service, as well as the reliability of the storage itself. The common measure is to employ storage replication (RAID-1, or application-level replication). However, this leads to additional operational complexity, utilization of network bandwidth, and to a duplication of storage demand (which doubles the storage capacity and cost).

Simplyblock mitigates the requirement to replicate storage. First, the same thinly provisioned volume can be attached to more than one Amazon EC2 instance (or container) and, second, the reliability of each individual volume is higher (99.9999%) due to the internal use of erasure coding (parity data) to protect the data.

Multi-attach helps to cut the storage cost by half.

The Cost of Backup

Last but not least, backups. Yes there is even more.

A snapshot taken from an Amazon EBS volume is stored in an S3-like storage. However, AWS charges significantly more per TiB than for the same storage directly on S3. Actually about 3.5 times.

Snapshots taken from simplyblock logical volumes, however, are stored into a standard Amazon S3 bucket and based on the standard S3 pricing, giving you yet another nice cost reduction.

Near-Zero RPO Disaster Recovery

Anyhow, there is one more feature that we really want to talk about. Disaster recovery is an optional feature. Our DR comes at a minimum RPO and can be deployed without any redundancy on either the block storage or the compute layer between zones. Additionally, no data transfers between zones are needed.

Simplyblock employs asynchronous replication to store any change on the storage pool to an S3 bucket. This enables a fully crash-consistent and near-real-time option for disaster recovery. You can bootstrap and restart your entire environment after a disaster. This works in the same or a different availability zone and without having to take care of backup management yourself.

And if something happened, accidental deletion or even a successful ransomware attack which encrypted your data. Simplyblock is here to help. Our asynchronous replication journal provides full Point-in-Time-Recovery functionality on the block storage layer. No need for your service or database to support it. Just rewind the storage to whatever point in time in the past.

It also utilizes write- and deletion-protected on its S3 bucket making the journal itself resilient to ransomware attacks. That said, simplyblock provides a sophisticated solution to disaster recovery and cybersecurity breaches without the need for manual backup management.

Simplyblock is Storage Optimization – just for you

Simplyblock provides a number of advantages for environments that utilize a large number of Amazon EBS gp2 or gp3 volumes. Thin provisioning enables you to consolidate unused storage capacity and minimize the spent. Due to the automatic pool enlargement (increasing the pool with additional EBS volumes or storage nodes), you’ll never run out of storage space but also only require the least amount.

Together with automatic tiering, you can move infrequently used data blocks to warm or even cold storage. Fully transparent to the application. The same is true for our disaster recovery. Built into the storage layer, every application can benefit from point in time recovery, removing almost all RPO (Recovery Point Objective) from your whole infrastructure. And with consistent snapshots across volumes, you can enable a full-blown infrastructure recovery in case of an availability zone outage, right from ground up.

With simplyblock you get more features than mentioned here. Get started right away and learn about our other features and benefits.

The post Simplyblock for AWS: Environments with many gp2 or gp3 Volumes appeared first on simplyblock.

Simplyblock provides sophisticated block storage-level Ransomware protection and mitigation. Together with recovery options, simplyblock enables Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) for any service or solution storing data.

What is Ransomware?

Ransomware is a type of malicious software (also known as malware) designed to block access to a computer system and/or encrypt data until a ransom is paid to the attacker. Cybercriminals typically carry out this type of attack by demanding payment, often in cryptocurrency, in exchange for providing a decryption key to restore access to the data or system.

Statistics show a significant rise in ransomware cyber attacks: ransomware cases more than doubled in 2023, and the amount of ransom paid reached more than a billion dollars—and these are only official numbers. Many organizations prefer not to report breaches and payments, as those are illegal in many jurisdictions.

The Danger of Ransomware Increases

The number and sophistication of attack tools have also increased significantly. They are becoming increasingly commoditized and easy to use, drastically reducing the skills cyber criminals require to deploy them.

There are many best practices and tools to protect against successful attacks. However, little can be done once an account, particularly a privileged one, has been compromised. Even if the breach is detected, it is most often too late. Attackers may only need minutes to encrypt important data.

Storage, particularly backups, serves as a last line of defense. After a successful attack, they provide a means to recover. However, there are certain downsides to using backups to recover from a successful attack:

• The latest backup does not contain all of the data: Data written between the last backup and the time the attack is unrecoverably lost. Even the loss of one hour of data written to a database can be critical for many enterprises.
• Backups are not consistent with each other: The backup of one database may not fit the backup of another database or a file repository, so the systems will not be able to integrate correctly after restoration.
• The latest backups may already contain encrypted data. It may be necessary to go back in time to find an older backup that is still “clean.” This backup, if available at all, may be linked to substantial data loss.
• Backups must be protected from writes and delete operations; otherwise, they can be destroyed or damaged by attackers. Attackers may also damage the backup inventory management system, making it hard or impossible to locate specific backups.
• Human error in Backup Management may lead to missing backups.

Simplyblock for Ransomware Protection and Mitigation

Simplyblock provides a smart solution to recover data after a ransomware attack, complementing classical backups.

In addition to writing data to hot-tier storage, simplyblock creates an asynchronously replicated write-ahead log (WAL) of all data written. This log is optimized for high throughput to secondary (low IOPS) storage, such as Amazon S3 or HDD pools, like AWS’ EBS st2 service. If this secondary storage supports write and deletion protection for pre-defined retention periods, as with S3, it is possible to “rewind” the storage to the point immediately before the attack. This performs a data recovery with near-zero RPO (Recovery Point Objective).

A recovery mechanism like this is particularly useful in combination with databases. Before the attack can start, database systems typically have to be stopped. This is necessary as all data and WAL files are in use by the database. This allows for automatically identifying a consistent recovery point with no data loss.

In the future, simplyblock plans to enhance this functionality further. A multi-stage attack detection mechanism will be integrated into the storage. Additionally, deletion protection after clearance from attack within a historical time window and precise automatic identification of attack launch points to locate recovery points.

Furthermore, simplyblock will support partial restore of recovery points to enable different service’ data on the same logical volumes to be restored from individual points in time. This is important since encryption of one service might have started earlier or later than for others, hence the point in time to rewind to must be different.

Conclusion

Simplyblock provides a complementary recovery solution to classical backups. Backups support long-term storage of full recovery snapshots. In contrast, write-ahead log-based recovery is specifically designed for near-zero RPO recovery right after a Ransomware attack starts and enables quick and easy recovery for data protection.

While many databases and data-storing services, such as PostgreSQL, may provide the possibility of Point-in-Time Recovery, the WAL segments need to be stored outside the system as soon as they are closed. That said, the RPO would come down to the size of a WAL segment, whereas with simplyblock, due to its copy-on-write nature, the RPO can be as small as one committed write.

Learn more about simplyblock and its other features like thin-provisioning, immediate clones and branches, encryption, compression, deduplication, and more. Or just get started right away and find the best Ransomware attack protection and mitigation to date.

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