Backup Dédalo best practices – what to backup and how often
Before you begin using Dédalo in production, you should set up a backup host, schedule automated backups, and develop a recovery plan as part of an overall automated backups plan.
Backup requirements and recommendations
The most important data to backup is the work system. It has the full data and media files to be preserved. The publishing system should also be backed up, but as this part is a copy of the working system data that may be public, a backup is not mandatory, but highly recommended.
Your backup plan has to be focused on:
- backup databases
- backup media files
- backup configuration files
Secondary host for backup
We recommend that the backup host and your Dédalo instance be geographically distant from each other. This ensures that backups are available for recovery in the face of major disaster or network outage at the primary site.
Storage space for the backup host: ~5x the size of the uncompressed Dédalo installation. Example: If you expect that your media files will require a 1TB, your backup host will need 5TB.
Backing up media files will require the most space, you should consider calculating the size of your media files to configure backup space. Our recommendation is store almost 3 full copies of your media files, and create a incremental script for daily changes.
Use an RAID system for your backup, we recommend a RAID 5 or RAID 6. RAID 5 is design to fail 1 hard drive at a time, RAID 6 is design to fail 2 hard drives at a time. If your backup is a large storage and it has many hard drives a RAID 6 could be necessary.
What to backup and how often
| priority | What? | How often? | Backup retention | How to backup? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| mandatory | Work system database containing all of Dédalo data - postgreSQL | daily backup (full) | Keep last 30 days. Keep last 12 months, keep every year copy | see how to make a full work system database backup |
| mandatory | Media files | daily (incremental) | keep daily, keep weekly, keep monthly | create a rsync or similar scrip to create an incremental backup |
| high | Publishing system database containing public data - MariaDB/MySQL | monthly backup(full) | Keep for 30 days | see how to make a full publishing system database backup |
| medium | All config Dédalo files | daily backup | Keep for 30 days | Create an archive of Dédalo config files and copy to backup server |
| low | Dédalo codebase | monthly backup | Keep for 1 month | create an archive of Dédalo site files and copy to backup server, it is not mandatory because Dédalo code is possible to install again |
| medium | log files (Apache server access, PHP logs, postgreSQL logs, MySQL logs, etc.) | daily backup | Keep for 6-24 months | Copy any new log files to the backup server. Log files are listed in the Logging section. |