Xtrabackup Manager - A toolset for making managing backups using xtrabackup simple!

Hi Folks,

Long time, no post -- I know, but I'll cut to the chase.

I have started work on a new GPL project entitled "Xtrabackup Manager". Just to be clear, the only relationship to Percona is that the toolset is designed to wrap around the Percona xtrabackup tool.

It is essentially a wrapper for xtrabackup that allows you to more easily manage and schedule your backups for multiple systems.

It is being written in PHP and the work-in-progress code is up on sourceforge. Currently it is not really near ready for general consumption as it is still under construction, but I'm trying to be a good OSS citizen and follow the "release early, release often" method.

A few things to note and disclaim:

#1. I am not the world's greatest developer, so please when you critique my code, be gentle ;-)
#2. It is written in PHP because it is the scripting language I am most familiar with. Not necessarily because it is the best tool for the job ( although I think it should do the job just fine ! )

Some info/features on what I have planned:

* Will run on Linux only to start with - so far have been testing on CentOS 5.5
* Setup any number of hosts and configure backup times using a cron expression (don't reinvent the wheel for scheduling)
* Give the tool a Linux user of it's own, it will hijack the crontab for scheduling
* Uses SSH trust as a means of running backups
* Uses tar stream and netcat for pulling backups over the network into the backup host
* Configure how many snapshots you wish to retain - utilizes full backup and incremental backup feature of the xtrabackup too for this. Automatically merges snapshots together as you roll forward with more snapshots.
* Support for multiple storage volumes -- all incrementals and seed must live on the same volume.
* Rich logging: Mutliple log levels, DEBUG/INFO/ERROR - Global system log and per host log files.
* Email alerting / reporting - Get alerted when backups fail. Get reports of what backups ran/when, etc.
* Requires a small MySQL instance for metadata, and management storage.
* Command-line and DB interface for configuration to start with.

Want to get involved? I'm looking for anyone who may be interested in developing a web front-end to the tool. I'm a decent hand with PHP, but I have not developed anything web related in quite some time.

Leave a blog comment or reach out to me on lmulcahy (at) marinsoftware (dot) com if you are interested!

Right now I am developing this for use in-house at the company I work for, so my focus is towards getting something working that we can begin using here.

I'm of course hoping that this will be a chance to give something back to the MySQL community and that others can benefit.

Please let me know your thoughts/feedback.

Lachlan