Holland Command-Line Reference

Here are the commands available from the ‘holland’ command-line tool:

help (h)

Usage: holland <command> --help(-h)

Provides basic information about the provided command. If no command is provided, it displays global help instead.

backup (bk)

Usage: holland backup [backup-set1, backup-set2, ..., backup-setN]

Runs the backup operation. If no backup-sets are specified, all active backup-sets (those defined in the ‘backupsets’ variable in holland.conf) are backed up.

One or more backup-sets can be specified directly, in which case only those backup-sets are backed up.

Additional Command Line Arguments:

--dry-run (-n): Can be used here to simulate, but not actually run, a backup. This should be used when troubleshooting a particular error before trying to run a real backup.

--no-lock (-f): Normally, only one instance of Holland can run at any given time using lock-files. Using this flag causes the lock-files to be ignored. This has some very clear use-cases but otherwise be mindful of using this setting as it can cause backups to fail in some cases.

--abort-immediately: abort on the first backup-set that fails (assuming multiple backupsets were specified)

Examples:

# holland bk --dry-run weekly: Attempts a dry-run of the weekly backup-set.

# holland bk --no-lock --abort-immediately: Attempts a backup of all the default backup-sets ignoring locks and aborting immediately if one of the backup-sets fails.

list-backups (lb)

Usage: holland list-backups

Provides extended information about available backups.

list-plugins (lp)

Usage: holland list-plugins

Lists all the available (installed) plugins available to Holland.

mk-config (mc)

Usage: holland mk-config <provider>

Generates a template backup-set for a particular provider (such as mysqldump). By default, the output is sent to standard out but can be copied to a file, either by using the --file, --edit, or -name options (see below).

Additional Command Line Arguments:

--edit: Load the file into the system text-editor for further modifications.

--file=FILE (-f): Write the output directly to provided file.

--name=NAME: Creates a backup-set usable in Holland, which basically means that a file is created of the provided name under the backup-set directory.

--provider: Indicates that the default provider configuration should be outputted instead. This is really only used when creating a provider config specifically - it should not be used for backup-sets.

Examples:

# holland mk-config mysql-lvm > mysql-lvm.conf: Output the default configuration for MySQL-LVM backups and write the contents out to mysql-lvm.conf in the current working directory.

# holland mc mysqldump --name=Bob --edit: Create a backup-set using the mysqldump provider named Bob and allow interactive editing of the backup-set before saving the file.

purge (pg)

Usage: holland purge <backup-set>/<backup-id>

Purges old backups by specifying the backup-set name and set-id.

For example: # holland purge mybackups/20090502_155438: Purge one of the backups taken on May 2nd, 2009 from the mybackups backup-set.