NEMS Migrator Off-Site Backup

Introduction

SD cards are prone to failure, and NEMS Linux has protections in place to ensure the longevity of your storage media. However, what happens if your card does fail?

NEMS Migrator provides a constant backup of your NEMS Server’s configuration, which can be backed up locally or in NEMS Cloud Services (or both). Restoring your NEMS Migrator backup gets your configuration back online within minutes.

Combined with NEMS CheckIn to notify you in event of failure, NEMS Migrator is an excellent way to ensure your NEMS Server is protected against failure.

Off-Site Backup

NEMS Migrator Off-Site Backup (OSB) is a feature of NEMS Cloud Services. It encrypts your NEMS Migrator backup on your local NEMS server and then transmits it to our cloud server over a secure connection where it is retained securely for 90 days.

Your NEMS Migrator Off-Site Backup is encrypted using a password you create locally in NEMS SST. Because of this, only you can restore from this file. Your private password is never sent to our server. Your account is authenticated based on your NEMS HWID and your NEMS Cloud Services Key which is provided to you when you register.

Sign up on Patreon (observe the reward options) and then add your NEMS Cloud Services Key to NEMS-SST to activate the service.

Once activated, NEMS will automatically backup your configuration off-site every day at 4am.

Logging

The backup results are stored in /var/log/nems/nems-osb.log

Log Format

The log file is a single line of data sent by the server. Each variable is separated by two colons (::) and begin with variable 0.

  • 0 - Plain text date/time of your NEMS server’s when the backup began

  • 1 - Response code after file sent

  • 2 - Plain-text interpretation of 1 (ie., Success or Failed)

  • 3 - Plain-text interpretation of 1 (ie., Reason for 2)

If (and only if) the backup was successful with a response code of 1, the following data will also be logged:

  • 4 - The remote server’s unix timestamp at time of off-site backup authentication

  • 5 - The size of this backup

  • 6 - Your total usage on the remote storage server, including this backup

  • 7 - How many daily backups are currently retained for your account

Backup Maintenance Schedule

Your NEMS Off-Site Backup is maintained automatically by the NEMS Cloud Services system. The backup schedule is as follows:

  • Past Month: Every successful backup will be retained and available to you.

  • Past Year: All backups beyond the past month will have the first successful backup per week retained and available to you. Additional backups will be purged. For example, if you had a successful backup every day, Monday’s backup will be retained and available to you, but Tuesday-Sunday will be purged.

  • Beyond One Year: Backups of this age are automatically purged and no longer available. If you require older backups, please ensure you keep a local copy of your backup.nems.