I use RRDTool quite a bit in some of my code.  Not to mention its heavy use in other open source projects.  But backing up my RRD files was a pain.  I can’t keep them in our network filesystem (OpenAFS) that has regular backups because the database files become corrupt.  I can’t move the files from one machine to another because they are very platform/architecture specific. Further, I’ve got a whole directory tree full of RRD files.

I wanted a tool that would scan a directory tree full of RRDs, create a mirror image of that tree elsewhere, and dump out the RRD files to XML.  So, each rlmtools/global/foo.rra file gets dumped out to /tmp/test/rlmtools/global/foo.xml.

So, I wrote it

• rrd-backup.py

The first argument is the directory tree to copy, the next argument is where to root the newly created tree.  A -b or -r argument is required for backup or restore mode, respectively.

In a similar vein I wrote a bash script that wraps the above for use with cron.  The srcipt runs the above script, tars and compresses the output, and places the file (with a date in the file name) at a specifc directory.  That directory is then pruned so that all backups are no older than about 2 weeks.

• rrd-backup.sh