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Backups

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hcooper edited this page Mar 8, 2026 · 2 revisions

There are three parts:

  • Backend infrastructure - this repo is used as a revision control & backup system for the backend infrastructure, and can be used to redeploy the backend infra to a different server or hostname simply. Also docker images are automatically published to ghcr.io which allow for easy redeployment.
  • Site content - page content, along with javascript & css are backed up as database dumps nightly. This is documented below.
  • Images - including other uploaded files can be snapshotted on the VM management control panel, and are also copied offsite by admins.

Backup Automation & Access

A docker container dedicated to running and accessing backups is part of backend stack.

The backup_manager container contains:

  • a mysql client, who's version matches the database container.
  • cronjobs to run mysqldump.
  • a bind mount to store backups outside of the container.
  • a bind mount to allow read-only access to images/.
  • sshd to allow access to retrieve backups from a non-privileged user.

Access

Direct access to the backups via ssh is controlled by the authorized_keys.

Once the file is updated, the container needs to be redeployed to pickup the change.

~: ssh backupreader@app.ropewiki.com -p 22001 ls -alh backups
total 604M
drwxr-xr-x 2 backupreader backupreader 4.0K Mar  8 01:23 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 backupreader backupreader 4.0K Mar  8 06:24 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 backupreader backupreader 201M Mar  5 10:01 all-backup-2026-03-05-100001.sql.zst
-rw-r--r-- 1 backupreader backupreader 202M Mar  6 10:00 all-backup-2026-03-06-100001.sql.zst
-rw-r--r-- 1 backupreader backupreader 202M Mar  7 10:01 all-backup-2026-03-07-100001.sql.zst
-rw-r--r-- 1 backupreader backupreader 371K Mar  7 10:01 backup.log
[...]

Images

In the backup manager, the backupreader's home directory has a symlink to the images folder which contains most of the file-based data uploaded to the site.

An off-site backup client should connect to this container and synchronize the full content of the images folder to back them up.

Offsite backups

The backup manager setup is designed to allow anyone wanting to make & copy backups to do so.

There's no official mechanism to transfer these offsite, however Coops makes nightly copies of both the database & images, storing them at home and in Backblaze B2.

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