ddonovan's picture
ddonovan - Fri, 2017/06/02 - 19:46

I had a drive failure and restored my old copy of Turnkey from a couple years ago, then ran a TKLBAM restore from S3.  That's all great, except no new backups have been run and when I click on either "Run Now" or "Run Local Simulation" the box grays but does nothing.  Suggestions?

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Support
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tklbam
Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Sat, 2017/06/03 - 01:44
So just run "tklbam-backup' from the commandline. It should either work (sounds unlikely) or fail with a stack trace. Assuming that there is an error trace, please post it here. Alternatively, you can post the last bit of the log file (should be /var/log/tklbam-backup.log or similar).
ddonovan's picture

ddonovan - Mon, 2017/06/05 - 06:01

root@webserver ~# tklbam-backup
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/tklbam-backup", line 510, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/tklbam-backup", line 374, in main
    get_server_id())
  File "/usr/lib/tklbam/hub.py", line 270, in new_backup_record
    response = self._api('POST', 'record/create/', attrs)
  File "/usr/lib/tklbam/hub.py", line 226, in _api
    return self.api.request(method, self.API_URL + uri, attrs, headers)
  File "/usr/lib/tklbam/hub.py", line 126, in request
    raise APIError(e.code, e.name, e.description)
hub.APIError: Backup plan record limit reached
 

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Mon, 2017/06/05 - 09:02
The last line of the stacktrace you posted explains it all: 
hub.APIError: Backup plan record limit reached

The Hub's free plan only supports one server. You'll either need to upgrade to a paid plan, or delete your existing backups.

ddonovan's picture

ddonovan - Mon, 2017/06/05 - 19:56

Is this how TKLBAM should work?  This seems like a bug to me.  It knows I have an existing backup, but because I had to restore it, I now have to delete it before backups can resume?  If this is expected behavior then okay, but it seems like it should be smarter than that, don't you think? 

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Fri, 2017/06/09 - 07:12
Perhaps let me explain a little. Hopefully that will help you understand.

We are big believers in Free/Libre Open Source Software and our founding mission was to make as much of the brilliant open source software available out there, easy to access for the general public. Because of this commitment, TurnKey Linux in general, and TKLBAM specifically are free, open source software. All the code is hosted publicly on GitHub. You are free to use it in whatever way you like. And we give all this away free of charge, with no strings attached.

But it costs us a ton of time, energy and/or money to provide all this stuff for free (some of the more complex appliances cost us in excess of $10k each, per year to maintain!). So we need to make some revenue somewhere (otherwise we'd be out of business a long time ago).

So to ensure our longevity and ongoing existence, we developed the Hub as a proprietary "value add" service (and still remains our primary source of revenue). To make life easy for users, and to increase uptake of our primary funding source (so we can do more cool stuff), we pre-configure TKLBAM to default to use the Hub. Because we're nice guys, we also decided to provide a free Hub option for our users.

But to ensure that we still would get some revenue from the Hub (so we can keep improving things and keep the lights on) we chose to adopt a "freemium" business model for the Hub's features. As one of the the primary functions of the Hub is for TKLBAM backups, we give all users backups for one server. Note I said "backups for one server", not "backups for one server, plus migration to a new server; and ongoing backups on the new server as well".

So you have a few options:

  • restore your backup to the same server as you had originally (the intended usage of a free Hub plan; as per what the Hub supports). [free]
  • purchase a "backup-standard" subscription on the Hub ($10/mth plus AWS S3 storage costs) and continue with your new server and keep all your old server backups. [$10/mth]
  • delete your old server backups and continue with your new server (TKLBAM should work fine once your old backup set is deleted). As a backstop, you could download your old backups (from AWS) before you delete them from the Hub. Make sure that you can unencrypt them properly first though, just in case. [free]
  • ditch the Hub altogether and manage your own TKLBAM backups (i.e. not linked to the Hub at all). Again you can download your old backups before you do that. [free]

Hopefully that clears the situation up and gives you some insight into how things work and why. And whilst you are under no obligation to provide financial support to TurnKey, I would argue that if you are getting value from it, then less than $0.33/day ($10 x 12 / 365) is a small price to pay to help ensure that we're still around tomorrow if/when you want us. :)

Having said all that, we certainly don't want people to misunderstand or be confused about what we are giving, versus what we are selling. We're not interested in tricking people into giving us money. We would much rather make less money than make a few bucks more in the short term at the cost of our integrity, reputation and ability to sleep at night. Your experience and perspective suggests that we could be doing better on that. TBH, I'm not really sure how we could improve, but if you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Take care and good luck with it all.

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