Configuring aegir for automated backups

Posted by keyo on September 3, 2009 at 1:34pm

Aegir has been of great help in managing my sites, there are a few things that would be nice to have though. One of these in automated backups, I did some searching thinking I could put some modules together to do this. I would ideally like to schedule them by hour, day, week etc.

Can anyone inform me on how do configure this?

It would also be great if backups could be sent to a different server, but for now an rsync or scp done by crontab will be fine.

Comments

If you just want to backup

Posted by briwood on September 4, 2009 at 6:15pm

If you just want to backup aegir-managed sites, you could put a script like this in aegir's crontab:

#!/bin/bash
drush provision backup $site_url
#then something like the following
tarball=$(ls -t1 ~/backups/*.gz |head -1)
scp $tarball aegir@$destination_server:$path

In the multiple webserver setup, user aegir exists on each server and can connect via passwordless keys between servers. My solution relies on that.

I too would like to see this

Posted by mrthumpz on September 8, 2009 at 7:58pm

I too would like to see this functionality included in Aegir 0.4.

I believe the correct way to go about this would be to implement it with the existing queue system.

All the functionality to backup a site is done, as it already does this when disabling, or migrating a system. Adding a queue to backup the sites shouldn't be too difficult, although it seems there is no mechanism for backup removal which will have to be developed. Perhaps a setting on the queue page to specify how long to retain backups.

I will probably attempt to tackle this issue in a month or so unless someone gets to it first.

re: I too would like to see this

Posted by Greg Coit on March 4, 2010 at 7:11pm

I've been looking at this the last day or so and I agree that utilizing the current queue system makes the most sense - if you read mig5's linked post, you see that backups initiated via the cl aren't registered with aegir. And re-implementing the work to get the backups registered seems more difficult to me than figuring out how to add a task to the queue via command-line. I'm currently exploring a way to add a task to hostmasters queue using drush and will report back any success.

While I agree with mig5 that backup locations are an issue, it's an issue related to aegir in general and not related to the automating of backups - ie: the issue exists either way regardless if they are automated or via the aegir interface.

Hope this helps,

Greg

--
Greg Coit
Systems Administrator
http://www.chapterthree.com

Users might be interested in

Posted by mig5 on January 19, 2010 at 9:03pm

Users might be interested in my batch aegir backup script.

Scheduled automated backups of sites from within Aegir itself directly is still a little way off and probably affected by such design decisions as where to store the backups, multisite and so on.

aegir sites automatic backup mechanism ... how? please

Posted by georged on March 20, 2010 at 10:49am

What is the overall picture or mechanism of automatic backup of multiple sites in aegir. What are the major factors involved? I assume it might involve : 1. putting a script in aegir crontab 2. using a backup software like rsync or fwbackup 3. getting service from a third party backup server etc etc.

Or does it have a different mechanism? which is the best back up software we can use in connection with aegir? And which is the best third party backup server available?

can anyone help me please
georged