Wondering how to do Backup compression in OnApp? We can help you!

Backup compression lets us reduce the storage space used by our backup files and thus increases the backup speed.

Here at Bobcares, we handle requests from our customers to compress their backup part of our Server Management Services.

Today let’s see how our Support Engineers do this using pigz tool for our customers.

How to do Backup compression in OnApp

One of the most common tools to compress backups on the backup server is GZip. However, it does not give any significant increase in the backup speed.

Thus we can compress backups using pigz instead of GZip. pigz or Parallel Implementation of GZip is a functional replacement that uses multiple cores that significantly increases the backup speed.

We will now see the steps that our Support Engineers follow to enable pigz for compressing backup.

Steps to Enable pigz instead of GZip

For enabling pigz and using it across the whole server, we can do the following:

1. Firstly, we have to download and install EPEL repository files:

RHEL/CentOS 6

# yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm

RHEL/CentOS 7

# yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

2. Then we need to install pigz from the EPEL repository using the following command:

# yum install pigz

3. Next, we will move gzip

# mv /bin/gzip /bin/gzip.bin

4. After that we will create a symlink using the following command:

# ln -s /usr/bin/pigz /bin/gzip

Once the backup compression is enabled, pigz will be overlayed by GZip RPM package reinstall or update.

Steps to Enable pigz on CloudBoot

In order to use pigz and unpigz on CloudBoot compute resources, do the following:

1. Firstly, we have to download the following files to our Control Panel:

CentOS 6

http://rpm.repo.onapp.com/utils/pigz-2.2.5-2.1.x86_64.tar.gz

CentOS 7

http://rpm.repo.onapp.com/utils/pigz-2.3.3-1.el7.centos.x86_64.tar.gz

2. Then distribute the files to CloudBoot compute resources with SCP to /tmp/ folder:

scp /root/pigz-2.2.5-2.1.x86_64.tar.gz root@192.168.1.31:/tmp/

3. After that we have to login to the compute resource with ssh:

cd /tmp/;tar xzvpf pigz-2.2.5-2.1.x86_64.tar.gz -C /

4. Next, we will move gzip:

mv /usr/bin/gzip /usr/bin/gzip.bin

5. After that we will create a symlink using the following command:

ln -s /bin/pigz /usr/bin/gzip

6. Then we will move unzip

mv /usr/bin/unzip /usr/bin/unzip.bin

7. Finaly we will craete a symlink for unpigz using the following command:

ln -s /bin/unpigz /usr/bin/unzip

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Conclusion

To conclude, we saw the steps that our Support Techs follow to compress backup in OnApp using pigz for our customers.