benji — ceph rbd backup - fast open source block based backup software

For your whole infrastructure.

Backup any block based device, like LVM volumes, whole disks or ceph/rbd volumes. In contrast to other backup solutions, benji always backs up all data on the disk, including the bootloader, kernel and partition data.

As benji deduplicates all data before writing it, it's possible to backup a whole rack with nothing more than a 1 gbit link.

„This is amazing software - looks like the backup solution I’ve been searching for to use with Ceph.“

Brian Chamberlain, I.P. Telecom Limited

Key Features

Using all your disks in parallel: benji reads from multiple disks and writes to multiple disks simultaniously. You'll get the most out of your disk arrays, NAS, SAN, Ceph or RAID.
Small and fast backups: benji deduplicates while reading from the block device and only writes blocks once if they are the same. With the help of ceph’s rbd diff, benji will only read the changed blocks since the last backup.
Fast restores: With supporting block storage (like ceph/rbd), fast sparse restores are possible.
Partial restores / directly mount your backups: With its own NBD server, benji backups can be directly mounted on any linux system.
High data consistency: Every backed up piece of data has a checksum stored with it and benji can scrub the backup data and check for correctness of the backups.
It will prevent you from doing stupid things: benji will not execute commands that will destroy data, unless you --force it to.
Parallel: backups while scrubbing while restoring: Parallel execution of multiple benji processes is fully supported.
Easy installation: dpkg -i backy*.deb
Free and Open Source Software: Anyone can review the source code and audit security and functionality. benji is licensed under the LGPLv3 license.