Backups on your own server

What you’ll do: make sure your Dexta server’s backups are running, copied off the server, and restorable.

Who can do this: your IT team, with shell access to the Dexta server. Commands below are from the deployment guide, deploy/DEPLOY.md, that comes with Dexta.

What runs by itself

• Every database is dumped daily at 02:30 India time, and uploaded files are archived daily. Both are kept 35 days.
• Dexta Books makes its own daily backup too: 35 dailies, plus the last of each month for 8 years.
• Every backup is encrypted (AES-256) before anything leaves the server.
• Copies go off the server every 6 hours to storage in an Indian region (for example AWS Mumbai) and are kept 400 days. You need your own storage account for this.

Checking backups

1. Run ./deploy/check-backups.sh. It reads each backup back to the end before calling it good.
2. Set the hourly check to email an alert (to your ALERT_EMAIL) for a stale or failed backup, or a disk below 20% free. The guide gives the cron line.
3. To take a backup now, run the one-off commands in the guide’s backups section (for example dc run --rm -e BACKUP_ONCE=1 db-backup).

Rehearsing a restore

1. Every quarter, run ./deploy/restore-mysql.sh --rehearse with a recent dump. It checks the dump reads back whole, loads it into a throwaway database (never the live one), lists what it found, then removes it. Note the date and result in your restore log.
2. Check uploaded files with ./deploy/restore-uploads.sh --check.
3. Only in a real recovery, run the restore with --live. It asks you to type RESTORE first.

Good to know

• Keep the backup encryption keys in a password manager that two named people can open. Without the keys, a backup can’t be read.
• The Companies (Accounts) Rules expect books of account to be backed up in India, which is why off-server copies go to an Indian region.
• Company Admins in Dexta Books can also see backups under Settings and Backups.

Related

• Upgrades and health checks
• Our cloud or your server
• Own server or cloud?