hashget 0.130

hashget deduplication and compression tool

hashget

Deduplication tool for archiving (backup) debian virtual machines

For example, very useful for backup LXC containers before uploading to Amazon Glacier.

Installation

Pip (recommended):

pip3 install hashget

or clone from git:

git clone https://gitlab.com/yaroslaff/hashget.git

QuickStart

Create debian machine (optional). Later with this example we will use 'mydebvm' container in default LXC location.

# lxc-create -n mydebvm -t download -- --dist=debian --release=stretch --arch=amd64

Now, the magic: create .tar.gz without files which could be downloaded from Internet.

# hashget --pack /var/lib/lxc/mydebvm/rootfs/ -zf mydebvm.tar.gz --exclude var/lib/apt/lists

Now lets compare results with usual tarring

# du -sh /var/lib/lxc/mydebvm/rootfs/
321M	/var/lib/lxc/mydebvm/rootfs/

# tar -czf /tmp/mydebvm-orig.tar.gz --exclude='var/lib/apt/lists' -C /var/lib/lxc/mydebvm/rootfs .

# ls -lh /tmp/mydebvm.tar.gz /tmp/mydebvm-orig.tar.gz 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 99M Mar  4 22:01 /tmp/mydebvm-orig.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 29M Mar  4 21:59 /tmp/mydebvm.tar.gz

Optimized backup is 70Mb shorter, just 29 instead of 99, 70% saved! If you pay for storing your backups (e.g. on Amazon Glacier, you now will pay just $29 where before you paid $99).

After this step, you have very small (just 29Mb for 300Mb+ generic debian 9 LXC machine rootfs)

Untarring:

# tar -xzf mydebvm.tar.gz -C rootfs

Just unpack to any directory as usual tar.gz file

# du -sh rootfs/
80M	rootfs/

At this stage we have just 80 Mb out of 300+ Mb total.

Restoring

After unpacking, you can restore files to new rootfs

# hashget -u rootfs
recovered rootfs/usr/bin/vim.basic
recovered rootfs/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdns-export.so.162.1.3
...
recovered rootfs/usr/share/doc/systemd/changelog.Debian.gz
recovered rootfs/usr/share/doc/systemd/copyright

Documentation

For more detailed documentation see Wiki.