SHIELD Documentation

Getting Started

Hi!

Welcome to the SHIELD Getting Started guide. This document is for you if you;

  1. Care about your data systems
  2. Want to run SHIELD to protect your data
  3. Have access to Docker

That's it!

After you've run through this guide, you'll have a working SHIELD installation, with a configured data system, a successful backup job, an archive, and you'll have run through a restore. More importantly, we hope you'll be comfortable working with SHIELD, and ready to explore more of what you can do with it.

Deploying SHIELD

We're going to use Docker Compose to spin up SHIELD and all of its components (there's quite a few of them).

$ mkdir ~/shield-demo
$ cd ~/shield-demo
$ curl -sLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shieldproject/shield/v8.7.3/docker-compose.yml

Now that you have the compose recipe file locally, let's fire it up.

$ docker-compose up

SHIELD is now running at https://localhost:9009. If you visit it in your browser of choice, you should see something like this:

The SHIELD Login Page

The default credentials for SHIELD are admin (username) and shield (password). After you log in, you will be presented with the initialization screen, where you'll set your master password, to protect the encryption parameters of all backup archives.

The SHIELD Initialization Page

After you've set your master password (via the form on the right), SHIELD generates a fixed key which isn't terribly important right now but is very important in production. It's used to encrypt the backup archives of the SHIELD metadata, for disaster recovery.

The Fixed Key

Copy that fixed key into your password manager for safe-keeping and click the "I Understand" button to continue.

You should now be all logged into SHIELD.

SHIELD Interface

Your First Backup Job

Restoring the Data

Backing up SHIELD Itself

In a disaster recover situations is important to get shield back up and running as soon as possible to facilitate the restore of the your other systems.

"Name": "SHIELD"
"Notes": "SHIELD Backup"
"Agent": "alex-lab-shield/shield@z1/0"
"Backup Plugin": "Local Filesystem (fs)"
"Base Directory": "/var/vcap/store/shield"
"Files to Include": <blank>*
"Files to Exclude": <blank>*
"Fixed-Key Encryption?": <checked>
"Strict Mode": <unchecked>