Benji Backup

Benji Backup is a block based deduplicating backup software. It builds on the excellent foundations and concepts of backy² by Daniel Kraft. Many thanks go to him for making his work public and releasing backy² as open-source software!

The primary use cases for Benji are:

• Fast and resource-efficient backup of Ceph RBD images to object or file storage
• Backup of LVM volumes (e.g. from servers or personal computers) to external hard drives or the cloud

Benji features a Docker image and Helm chart for integration with Kubernetes. This makes it easy to setup a backup solution for your persistent volumes.

Status

Benji is currently nearing beta quality. It passes all included tests. The documentation isn't completely up-to-date. Please open an issue on GitHub if you have a usage question that is not or incorrectly covered by the documentation. And have a look at the CHANGES file for any upgrade notes.

Benji requires Python 3.6.5 or newer because older Python versions have some shortcomings in the concurrent.futures implementation which lead to an excessive memory usage.

Older versions contained a Docker image for integrating with Rook. As I no longer have access to a Rook installation and Rook changed its Docker base image in the meantime I've dropped this support for the time being. The new generic Kubernetes image (benji-k8s) can be used instead, but it will require some work to get the Ceph credentials into the container. I'd accept patches for a third Docker image (resurrecting the old benji-rook image) or maybe it's also possible to integrate the changes into the benji-k8s image without too much fuss.

Main Features

Small backups

Benji deduplicates while reading from the block device and only writes blocks once if they have the same checksum. Deduplication takes into account all historic data present in the backup storage target and so spans all backups and all backup sources. This can make deduplication more effective if images are clones of a common ancestor.

Fast backups

With the help of Ceph's rbd diff, Benji will only read the blocks that have changed since the last backup. Even when this information is not available (like with LVM) Benji will still only backup changed blocks.

Fast restores

With supporting block storage (like Ceph's RBD), a sparse restore is possible. This means, sparse blocks (i.e. blocks which are holes or are all zeros) will be skipped on restore.

NBD server facilitating file-based restores

Benji brings its own NBD (network block device) server which makes backup images directly mountable - even over the network on another machine. This enables file-based restores without restoring the whole image.

These mounts are read/write (unless you specify -r) and writing to them creates a copy-on-write backup version (i.e. the original version is not modified). This makes it possible to do repairs on the image (fsck, etc.) and restore the repaired copy afterwards.

Small bandwidth requirements

As only changed blocks are written to the backup storage, a small connection is sufficient even for larger backups. Even with newly created block devices the traffic to the backup target is small, because these block devices usually contain mostly zeros and are deduplicated before reaching the target storage.

In addition to this Benji supports fast state-of-the-art compression based on zstandard. This further reduces the required bandwidth and also reduces the storage space requirements.

Support for a variety of backup storage targets

Benji supports AWS S3 as a data backend but also has options to enable compatibility with other S3 implementations like Google Storage, Ceph's RADOS Gateway or Minio.

Benji also supports Backblaze's B2 Cloud Storage which opens up a very cost effective way to keep your backups.

Last but not least Benji can also use any file based storage including external hard drives and NFS based storage solutions.

Confidentiality

Benji supports AES-256 in GCM mode to encrypt all your data on the backup storage. By using envelope encryption every block is encrypted with its own unique random key which makes plaintext attacks even more difficult.

Integrity

Every backed up block keeps a checksum with it. When Benji scrubs the backup, it reads the block from the backup storage, calculates its checksum and compares it to the stored checksum. If the checksum differs, it's most likely that there was an error while storing or reading the block, or because of bit rot on the backup target storage.

Benji also supports a faster light-weight scrubbing mode which only checks the object's existence and metadata consistency.

If a scrubbing failure occurs, the defective block and the backups it belongs to are marked as 'invalid' and the block will be re-read for the next backup version even if rbd diff indicates that it hasn't changed.

Scrubbing can also take a percentage value of how many blocks of the backup it should scrub. So you can statistically scrub 16% each day and have a full scrub each week (16*7 > 100).

Concurrency: Backup while scrubbing while restoring

As Benji is a long-running process, you don't want to wait until something has finished of course. You can scrub, backup and restore at the same time and multiple times each.

Benji even supports distributed operation where multiple instances run on different hosts or in different containers at the same time.

Cache friendly

While reading large pieces of data on Linux, buffers and caches get filled up with data, which in case of backups is essentially only needed once. Benji instructs Linux and Ceph to immediately forget the data once it's processed.

Simplicity: As simple as cp, but as clever as a backup solution needs to be

With a small set of commands, good --help and intuitive usage, Benji feels mostly like cp. And that's intentional, because we think, a restore must be fool-proof and succeed even if you're woken up at 3am in the morning.

Prevents you from doing something stupid

By providing a configuration value for how old backups need to be in order to be able to remove them, you can't accidentally remove very young backups. An exception to this is the enforcement of retention policies which will also remove recent backups if configured.

With benji protect you can protect versions from being removed. This is important when you plan to restore a version which according to the retention policy may be removed soon. During restore a lock will also prevent removal, however, by protecting it, it cannot be removed until you decide that it is no longer needed.

Also, you'll need to use --force to overwrite existing files or volumes.

Free and Open Source Software

Anyone can review the source code and audit security and functionality. Benji is licensed under the LGPLv3 license. Please see the documentation for a full list of licenses.