Backups

Simple backups with mysqldump and tar

Use mysqldump to export your SQL data, then create a compressed archive of it and all your OneBody files:

1. Dump the database to a sql file:

   mysqldump -u root -p onebody > /var/www/onebody/db/onebody.sql
   

2. Check that the file contains data:

   less /var/www/onebody/db/onebody.sql
   

   IMPORTANT: Verify your church's data is in this file.

   Press q to quit this view.

3. Compress the file to save space:

   tar czvf ~/onebody_backup_`date +%Y-%m-%d-%H%M`.tgz /var/www/onebody
   

Restore

To do a restore of the SQL database, extract the tgz file, then:

cd /var/www/onebody
bundle exec rake db:create
mysql -u root -p onebody < onebody.sql

If your photo files, attachments, documents, etc. were lost, you also have a copy of them in your backup. Just copy the public/system contents from your tgz into /var/www/onebody/public/system.

Restoring to a different server

You can also restore to a different server with OneBody installed! Just make sure the version of OneBody installed is the same or newer than the one that was running when you made the backup.

See the Upgrade by Copying Data page for more help.

Backups using the Backup gem

Backup is an excellent ruby tool to use for file and database backups of your OneBody installation. Backup is documented thoroughly here and I would urge you to read the documentation to see what features beyond those discussed here are available.

To install Backup, simply install the backup gem:

sudo gem install backup

The beauty of Backup is the number of different model components which it provides. For my backup configuration, I want both file and database backups, which are gzipped and encrypted before being stored locally and remotely (S3). I also want to be notified via e-mail if a backup operation fails to succeed.

To create the model file for this desired backup configuration, I simply run:

backup generate:model --trigger onebody --archives --storages='local,s3' --compressor='gzip' --notifiers='mail' --databases='mysql' --encryptor='openssl'

Now, we need to tailor the modeled configuration to suit our environment:

vi Backup/models/onebody.rb

Here are the specific changes I made, however mileage will most likely vary:

• In the archive block, I added an archive.add for /var/www/onebody/public/system. This will ensure that at minimum my user uploaded files will be backed up. However, you could back up the entire /var/www/onebody directory if you prefer. I also commented out the other generic archive.add and archive.exclude lines that were there by default.
• In the database block, I added the necessary details for my MySQL configuration. Note that you should either specify db.socket or db.host and db.port.
• In the store_with S3 block, I specified my AWS S3 details. Note that I also added an explicit s3.keep = 30 to ensure that old backups are rotated out to keep my AWS S3 bills down.
• In the encrypt_with block, I updated encryption.password with a password to encrypt my backups with. You will need to use this same password to decrypt the backups when needing to do a restore.
• Lastly, I updated the notify_by Mail block to reflect my specific e-mail configuration. I run Exim on my OneBody server, and as you can see most default lines were removed:

  notify_by Mail do |mail|
    mail.on_success           = false
    mail.on_warning           = true
    mail.on_failure           = true

    mail.from                 = "someuser@onebodyserver"
    mail.to                   = "[email protected]"
    mail.port                 = 25
    mail.domain               = "localhost"
  end

(Replace someuser@onebodyserver and [email protected] with appropriate From: and To: addresses)

Now, go ahead and attempt a manual backup:

backup perform --trigger onebody

The output here should be quite verbose, and it will be quite apparent if any problems were encountered.

Before moving on, I would strongly urge you to try obtaining the backup you just made from S3 and validating that you can restore it in a development environment. There is little point doing anything further if the backups you are making aren't complete and will not get you back up and running with minimal data loss should, for example, your server experience a drive failure.

Assuming the manual backup was successful and you have verified that the backup being sent to S3 is good, you can go ahead and add a cronjob so that backups are taken on a routine schedule. In my environment, I want backups to be taken daily at midnight (00:00).

Firstly, edit your crontab:

crontab -e

Now, add a new line for backups:

0 0 * * * backup perform --trigger onebody

If you see additional crontab entries for other OneBody-related jobs, go ahead and add this new line after the # End Whenever generated tasks for: /var/www/onebody/config/schedule.rb line. We do not want to interfere with the whenever crontab configuration for OneBody rails-related jobs.

Again, please refer to the Backup documentation to see the full list of features and options available to use.