mod_backup

Daily backup of database and files

Losing data is bad for business. This applies to your customers as well if you are building sites for them. It is critical to keep backups of any Zotonic sites you develop.

After enabling mod_backup, it will make a backup of the site’s data and configuration every night at 3 AM. It keeps the last 7 daily copies of the data, so you have always a backup to roll back to.

The backups are stored under backup in the files directory of your site. Check in the admin under System > Status to see where the site files directory is located.

The site’s media files are stored as a <site-name>-N.tar.gz file. The configuration is named config-<site-name>-N.tar.gz, while the database is stored compressed in a <site-name>-N.sql.gz file. N is the day number.

It is possible to encrypt the backups by enabeling the Encrypt Backups option on the configuration page of the backup service. When you enable this for the first time, a password will be generated automatically. This password should be stored in a safe location to be able to decrypt the backups. When encryption is enabled, the files have the .enc extension.

The zotonic shell command decrypt can be used to decrypt encrypted zotonic backup files.

If mod_filestore is enabled then the media files are not backed up, as it is assumed that the files are already backed up on the cloud filestore. The data backups are uploaded to the cloud filestore, so they are also backed up.

If mod_filestore is not enabled then we advise to add a cron script to the server for copying the data to remote storage.

Per-resource revision log

If a resource is updated or deleted then a copy of the resource data is saved to a revision log.

Using the revision log a resource can be rolled back to an older revision or, when deleted, recovered.

Revisions are pruned daily and deleted if:

1. older than 18 months; This can be changed by setting the configuration mod_backup.revision_retention_months to another number of months.
2. of user resources and older than 90 days; This can be changed by setting the configuration mod_backup.user_revision_retention_days to another number of days.
3. of users resources and the users was deleted for at least 30 days; This can be changed by setting the configuration mod_backup.user_deletion_retention_days to another number of days (maximum 30).

Currently edges (connections) and medium files are not kept in the revision log.