Backup Utilities should be run on a host dedicated to long-term permanent storage and must have network connectivity with the GitHub Enterprise Server appliance.

Backup host software requirements are modest: Linux or other modern Unix operating system (Ubuntu is highly recommended) with bash, git, OpenSSH 5.6 or newer, rsync v2.6.4 or newer* (see below for exceptions), jq v1.5 or newer, and bc v1.07 or newer.

Ubuntu is the operating system we use to test backup-utils and it’s what we recommend you use too. You are welcome to use a different operating system, and we'll do our best to help you if you run into issues. But we can't guarantee that we'll be able to resolve issues that are specific to that operating system.

Additionally, we encourage the use of Docker, as it ensures compatible versions of the aforementioned software are available to backup-utils.

The parallel backup and restore feature will require GNU awk and moreutils to be installed.

The backup host must be able to establish outbound network connections to the GitHub appliance over SSH. TCP port 122 is used to backup GitHub Enterprise Server.

CPU and memory requirements are dependent on the size of the GitHub Enterprise Server appliance. We recommend a minimum of 4 cores and 8GB of RAM for the host running GitHub Enterprise Backup Utilities. We recommend monitoring the backup host's CPU and memory usage to ensure it is sufficient for your environment.

The fix in rsync 3.2.5 for CVE-2022-29154 can cause severe performance degradation to backup-utils.

If you encounter this degradation you can mitigate it by using the --trust-sender flag, which is available in rsync >= v3.2.5.

If your backup host is running rsync < v3.2.5 you may or may not need to make changes to your rsync package, depending on whether your rsync package has backported the fix for CVE-2022-29154 without also backporting the --trust-sender flag.

If your rsync package has backported the CVE fix and the --trust-sender flag then you don't need to change anything.

However, if your rsync package has backported the CVE fix without backporting the --trust-sender flag then you have three options:

1. Downgrade (using the package manager on your host) the rsync package to a version before the CVE fix was backported
2. Upgrade (using the package manager on your host) the rsync package to v3.2.5 or newer
3. Manually download rsync v3.2.5 or newer and build the rsync binary

Option #3 is required if your operating system's package manager does not have access to rsync v3.2.5 or later (e.g. Ubuntu Focal).

Storage requirements vary based on current Git repository disk usage and growth patterns of the GitHub appliance. We recommend allocating at least 5x the amount of storage allocated to the primary GitHub appliance for historical snapshots and growth over time.

Backup Utilities use hard links to store data efficiently, and the repositories on GitHub Enterprise Server use symbolic links so the backup snapshots must be written to a filesystem with support for symbolic and hard links.

To check if your filesystem supports creating hardlinks of symbolic links, you can run the following within your backup destination directory:

touch file
ln -s file symlink
ln symlink hardlink
ls -la

Using a case sensitive file system is also required to avoid conflicts.

Performance of backup and restore operations are also dependent on the backup host's storage. We recommend using a high performance storage system with low latency and high IOPS.

Starting with Backup Utilities v2.13.0, version support is inline with that of the GitHub Enterprise Server upgrade requirements and as such, support is limited to three versions of GitHub Enterprise Server: the version that corresponds with the version of Backup Utilities, and the two releases prior to it.

For example, Backup Utilities v2.13.0 can be used to backup and restore all patch releases from 2.11.0 to the latest patch release of GitHub Enterprise Server 2.13. Backup Utilities v2.14.0 will be released when GitHub Enterprise Server 2.14.0 is released and will then be used to backup all releases of GitHub Enterprise Server from 2.12.0 to the latest patch release of GitHub Enterprise Server 2.14.

Backup Utilities v2.11.4 and earlier offer support for GitHub Enterprise Server 2.10 and earlier releases up to GitHub Enterprise Server 2.2.0. Backup Utilities v2.11.0 and earlier offer support for GitHub Enterprise Server 2.1.0 and earlier.

Note: You can restore a snapshot that's at most two feature releases behind the restore target's version of GitHub Enterprise Server. For example, to restore a snapshot of GitHub Enterprise Server 2.11, the target GitHub Enterprise Server appliance must be running GitHub Enterprise Server 2.12.x or 2.13.x. You can't restore a snapshot from 2.10 to 2.13, because that's three releases ahead.

Note: You cannot restore a backup created from a newer version of GitHub Enterprise Server to an older version. For example, an attempt to restore a snapshot of GitHub Enterprise Server 2.21 to a GitHub Enterprise Server 2.20 environment will fail with an error of Error: Snapshot can not be restored to an older release of GitHub Enterprise Server..

Using multiple backup hosts or backup configurations is not currently recommended.

Due to how some components of Backup Utilities (e.g. MSSQL) take incremental backups, running another instance of Backup Utilities may result in unrestorable snapshots as data may be split across backup hosts. If you still wish to have multiple instances of Backup Utilities for redundancy purposes or to run at different frequencies, ensure that they share the same GHE_DATA_DIR backup directory.