FOSS4G'13

The working site for the conference committee of FOSS4G 2013

Web site backup

Posted by Barry Rowlingson on January 2, 2013

Now we're using the web server for real things, do we have a backup service? AWS may be nice and stable and unlikely to die horribly but we still need nightly backups in case of disasters.

I've got plenty of drive space kicking around (some 1TB desktop USB drives) so I could run nightly incremental backups, the only issue would be whether this would effect AWS network traffic costs, or if it would be cheaper to do it via an Amazon system (if such exists, I don't know).

Then there's the question of what to backup - especially the MySQL database. I don't really know the best way of doing this - with Postgres I generally dump to .sql and back that up, since backing up the binary storage files is a bad thing... Ideas?

Comments

Antony Scott on January 2, 2013:

Yes, I’ve been wondering about this. Better WP Security (which we have installed) will do a scheduled automated backup of the database to the file system – it’s one of the config options (it will also email you a copy). So if you do a nightly backup, it will pick the database up too. Had to restore a whole site using this the other day, and it was fine.

Antony

Barry Rowlingson on January 2, 2013:

But does it just pull out the WP database? We need to make sure we get the
OJS database and the files uploaded to it as well. When I settle back into
the office on Monday I'll investigate.

Jo Cook on January 2, 2013:

Wordpress Database is backed up weekly and emailed to me, something to back up files and OJS database would be good

Jo Cook on January 4, 2013:

I've done a little digging and there seems to be a plugin for ojs to do backups: http://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=4914 or here for the probably latest version: https://github.com/pkp/ojs/tree/master/plugins/generic/backup

If this works on our system it claims to backup database, files and code, so covers all our requirements. I don't know if it's configured to send a dump of everything via email or anything like that though- but it seems like a good approach rather than rolling our own solution (which seems like the only other option to me)

Not sure if the ojs admin instructions are available anywhere on here- if someone can point me at them then I'll have a go at installing, otherwise it will need to wait for Barry.

Jo