Question

Photo of Andrew Lee

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Rock Backup Plan

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What are some of you using for a backup plan?  We host with Arvixe and currently have our DB backed up weekly.  I assume there are some other config files in the root directory that would be needed on a restore as well.  Will there be a rock backup built into the application at some point, or is there an easy way to achieve this?

Thanks!

Andrew

  • Michael Garrison

    Michael Garrison

    We host locally, so this is unlikely to be an answer for you. But I'll mention it anyway- perhaps you have more access than I suspect to your server, or maybe it will help someone else.
    SQL Server Express apparently doesn't have the nice menu option to backup automatically on a schedule like the paid versions do, but using the instructions at http://www.campusmvp.net/blog/sql-server-express-scheduled-backups-and-retention I'm backing our database up nightly, in a moving "week" window as they mention is possible in that article. Each day's backup is about 250MB for us with around 10k users, but of course YMMV, especially if you have added many profile pictures.
    My presumption is that in a disaster recovery scenario I would probably download and install Rock fresh on a new database, then once it was updated to the current version, restore the backup. Though I do keep shadow copies and conventional backups of the actual Rock files as well.

    • Jim Michael

      Jim Michael

      I'll jump in to add that we host locally, too, and don't even back up SQL Server ;-) How can that be? Our Rock server (and most of our servers, really) are virtual and we use a product called Veeam to back up the entire VMs, thus the SQL db can be easily extracted from one of these backup files if need be, and of course the entire machine and be restored back to a running state if Something Bad Happens. The point is that there are LOTS of options when you're backing up a local server... but things get a little trickier when you're hosting. If I were hosting I would likely be pulling down backups to local storage a LEAST daily, and perhaps also sending them to some Amazon S3 (or even Glacier, for long-term archive) storage.

      • Photo of Rock RMS

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        Looks like there is some good info here on what others are doing. We'll add that we don't have any current plans for an in app backup. We suppose it would be possible for Rock to generate a zip file of the entire web root, but this could get quite large and won't fill the need entirely unless you manually downloaded it to another system. We're open for great ideas here, but they would have to be able to run on all hosting platforms (internal hosted as well as external vendor hosted solutions).