[LON-CAPA-admin] Database backup?

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Hi,

On May 14, 2012, at 2:15 PM, Neubauer, Paul wrote:
> 
> 
> We (Ball State U) are planning a hardware upgrade (among other things) and in the planning phase, the question of backups arose. 
> 
> As I understand it, Lon-Capa uses a MySQL database, but we have normally been doing our backups without shutting down the Lon-Capa software. That is, we basically just copy off the files to our backup system. However, if the database is running at the time, it would seem that we would be vulnerable to cases where changes might occur within the database that would not be backed up. For some inexplicable reason this question had escaped me for all these years.

The data in MySQL is irrelevant, it's only used for caching.

For a hardware upgrade, please refer to

http://www.lon-capa.org/hardwareupgrade.html

Following those instructions step-by-step should result in minimal downtime.

Backup is another issue. What really needs to be backed up is /home, as it includes both user data and resources. We usually do an rsync of that tree to another server for backup.

- Gerd.