I am searching for a backup strategy for my web application files.
I am hosting my (laravel) application at an ubuntu (18.04) server in the cloud and currently have around 80GB of storage that needs to be backed up (this grows fast). The biggest files are around ~30mb, the rest of it are small jpg/txt/pdf files.
I want to make at least 2 times a day a full backup of the storage directory and store it as a zip file on a local server. I have 2 reasons for this: independence from cloud providers, and for archiving.
My first backup strategy was to zip all the contents of the storage folder en rsync the zip, this goes well until a couple of gigabytes then the server is completely stuck on cpu usage.
My second approach is with rsync, but this i can't track when a file is deleted / added.
I am looking for a good backup strategy that preferable generate zips before or after backup and stores them so we can browse and examine back in time.
Strange enough i could not find anything that suits me, i hope anyone can help me out.
I agree with #RobertFridzema that the whole server becomes unresponsive when using ZIP functionality from spatie package.
Had the same situation with a customer project. My suggestion is to keep the source code files within version control. Just backup the dynamic/changing files with rsync (incremental works best and fast) and create a separate database backup strategy. For example with MySQL/Mariadb: mysqldump, encrypt the resulting file and move it to an external storage as well.
If ZIP creation still is a problem, I would maybe use a storage which is already set up with raid functionality or if that is not possible, I would definitly not use the ZIP functionality on the live server. rsync incremental to another server and do the backup strategy there.
Spatie has a package for Laravel backups that can be scheduled in the laravel job scheduler. It will create zips with the entire project including storage dirs
https://github.com/spatie/laravel-backup
Related
I'm fairly new to server administration. I have my Laravel app up and running and I want to make sure it has proper backups. I have researched some backup packages and I have settled on https://github.com/spatie/laravel-backup.
However, once the server fails, I need to know how to use the most recent backup (which will be on AWS S3) to restore the database on the rebuilt server. Are there any suggestions for guides on how to do this? I can't seem to find any unless it doesn't really require much learning and instead just a couple mySQL commands.
Thanks!
I would use replication and within Laravel i would try to switch connection to the replica database server so things can run smoothly until the problem is resolved.
Take a look at this Cross-Region Replication
A typical production environment is automatically running backups on most important things that your deployment needs in order to recover from a failure. Those parts would commonly be your database and storage folder, and configuration files.
Also when you deploy a laravel application there aren't many things that are "worth" backing up , you can choose the entire disk to be mirrored somewhere or you can schedule a backup script which run every N times and backups the things that are more important to your application.
Personally i wouldn't rely on an package from laravel to handle my backups , you can always use other backup utilities, replication and so on.
Update
Take a look at the link below:
User Guide » Amazon RDS DB Instance Lifecycle » Backing Up and Restoring
Backing Up and Restoring
You can call the API function RestoreDBInstanceFromDBSnapshot as showed on example.
But i don't think something automated exists that would auto restore or magically make everything work, you need to do a lot of security checks if something like that would even be attempted. Final word i believe a good solution manually entering or sending the request would be the most solid solution.
I have built a showcase Magento installation that I am about to deploy public. I'd like to give people backend access but indeed I don't want their changes to stick - not sure how to go about this. What's the best way?
I have seen a Magento showcase somewhere that gave the backend access stating the website will be renewed every 12 hours. So I suppose there is a cron job starting a script that will copy contents of one directory into the other (the public one) every 12 hours?
There are two good solutions:
1. Virtual Machine
Run the entire site in a virtual machine or VPS. Make a snapshot of the machine when it is in the state you want to reset it to. Have a cronjob that triggers the "return to snapshot" routine. The exact details vary between hosts but look for a host with an API.
2. File Copy and DB Reset
Keep a copy of all the files in another folder, together with a dump of the database. You can use mysqldump to create a database dump. You can then go back to that state by having a cronjob that removes the current folder, copies back the old folder and imports the database dump.
There are a few ways to import the database dump file, including the SOURCE command:
SOURCE dumpfile.sql;
We have a CMS on heroku, some files were generated by the CMS, how can I pull those changes down? Can I commit the changes remotely and pull them down? Is there an FTP option of some kind?
See: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos#ephemeral-filesystem
It's not designed for persistent file generation and usage.
In practice, it works like this: User puts some code into a repository. That code is dynamically pulled into temporary Amazon EC instances and executed. The code can be pulled from virtual machine to virtual machine, node to node, without disruption, across data centers. There is no real "place" to get the products of your code from the environment, because anything generated by the checked-out code can (and will) be destroyed as your code deploy skips around between the temporary machines.
That being said, there are some workarounds:
If your app includes something like a file browser within your deployed code, you can grab the (entirely) temporary files using that file browser, and commit it back to your persistent code trunk.
Another option is using something like S3 for your persistent storage, with your application reading from, and writing to, a data storage service, knowing that while heroku will just re-write and destroy your local data on a frequent basis, the external service will maintain the files.
Similarly, you can change your application to use heroku's postgres for persistent data storage, or use Amazon's RDS, (etc.).
Alternately, you can edit your application in such a way as to ensure that any files generated by it will be regenerated every time the code is refreshed, redeployed, and moved around.
Every day ~30000 files are created on one server and then they should all be moved to a web server. Until now I've been using ncftpput for transferring all the files but it's very slow and stops now and then.
My plan now is to gzip all the files and then use scp to transfer the archive to my web server and then unpack it there.
Is this a good solution or is there a better way?
I would use "rsync" if available on your platform. It is restartable, only does the minimum necessary and very fast and easy to use.
I think it is better than upload raw files.
But I found this: Slow Upload Speeds via SCP - https://discussion.dreamhost.com/thread-134902.html
I have roughly 200 files that I need to push to our live server after business hours. In addition to this push I have a few database updates that I need to run in conjunction with this roll out.
What has been done in the past on this system is to create a directory on the server of the updated files and create a cron script to copy those files to overwrite their previous versions on the server. And then executing the calls to the database.
Here are the problems I am trying to work around:
1) There is no staging server.
2) There is no easy way to push from our version control (svn) to our live server
3) There are a lot of files and the directory structure is deep so setting up a copy of the directories to be copied over on the server seems precarious and time consuming.
What's the best way to do this?
The way I've done similar things in the past is to have a cron job run a script an administrative machine that:
1) checks out the files I need on my production server on some sort of staging machine
2) rsync's the files onto the server
3) runs a post-rsync script on the server (say via ssh'ing to the server)
However, you specify that you have no ability to use a staging machine, by which I assume you mean that you have no administrative machine at all, and that you cannot check out your repository on the server either. That makes doing this cleanly far harder. Are you sure you can't at least use your workstation or some similar box as an administrative or staging machine here?