[Building Sakai] How to take a backup through Sakai

[Hedrick Charles]

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. If you want to be able to restore everything at once, that's fairly easy. That is what you would do to protect against disasters. If you want to be able to restore an individual site, that's harder.

For disaster recovery:
  * normal files are easy. any file system backup is fine
  * the database is the problem. If your filesystem backup takes a true, single-point snapshot, then you don't need to do anything special about the database. Otherwise you must either bring the database to idle while you do the backup (or at least take the snapshot), or you'll need to use a database backup product

To recover individual sites:
  * this isn't very easy. You can export an individual site using an administrative tool, but (1) a few tools aren't properly backed up, and (2) this is probably not useful for a large installation
  * Sakai very seldom deletes data. In most cases we can recover individual sites by doing a small amount of work in the dattabase. Where this isn't enough, the only solution I know is to restore the database to the point of time you're interested in and start a second copy of Sakai pointed at that copy of the database. This plus use of the file system backup will normally get the data but it isn't very convenient.

Fortunately we haven't needed to recover specific sites very often, so this hasn't been an actual problem for us. We have had to recover our database from backup once. We keep three backups (several of which exist in more than one location and on more than one storage technology) of the database: a file system snapshot, a backup database that is synced with the primary, and a full dump to a text file. We had a database failure during a time when several of the backups weren't working. We had to recover from the text backup. It took two full days, and with that we didn't restore the event and session logs (which are most of our data). Never again. We've improved our database hardware. We can now rebuild the whole thing from text backup in a couple of hours, and we have enough other approaches that we should never have to do that. We moved from Mysql 4.1 to 5.1 by reloading from a text backup, rather than upgrading the database in place through a couple of releases.


On Nov 1, 2010, at 3:34:09 AM, “Naira farooq wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> Is there a way in filesystem to take auto backup of all the files through Sakai?
> 
> -- 
> Naira Farooq Ch
> Software Engineer
> FAST-NU
> Islamabad
> Contact Details:
> 0332-5155714
> 051-8314100 Ext 263
> 
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