Cloudron backups - user database and email

[charlesnw]

How is the cloudron user database backed up?

What about email accounts ?

What about the application access settings / groups etc?

How can I perform a complete backup of my cloudron instance ?

Yes , the application data is safe. That’s very important of course. User files and other data.

However user emails don’t appear to be backed up and neither does the user database.

[jdaviescoates]

Everything is backed up. It's possibly to migrate or restore the complete server from a backup.

[charlesnw]

How can I verify that? Can you prove that? What file names / patterns should I be looking for?

[charlesnw]

From the cloudron backups page:

“
Only the database and app user data is backed up
“

[BrutalBirdie]

@charlesnw said in Cloudron backups - user database and email:

How can I perform a complete backup of my cloudron instance ?

See: https://docs.cloudron.io/backups/#snapshot-cloudron

To take a backup of Cloudron and all the apps, click the Backup now button in the Settings page:

@charlesnw said in Cloudron backups - user database and email:

How can I verify that?

By restoring the whole Cloudron server on a new one.
You can use the restore dry run to not mess up your existing running server.
See: https://docs.cloudron.io/backups/#restore-cloudron

@charlesnw said in Cloudron backups - user database and email:

Can you prove that?

why so susspicous? It is a good thing that you want to verify backups are working
But sure, here is my topic, give it a read

Shooting a Cloudron Server right in the brain - I deleted appsdata and boxdata by accident

@charlesnw said in Cloudron backups - user database and email:

From the cloudron backups page:

“
Only the database and app user data is backed up
“

This passage of text is only part of the whole text of https://docs.cloudron.io/backups/#overview
Hmm depending on your technical background this text can sound a bit missleading.

Let me try clear this up a bit.

Let's say you are using the LAMP App of Cloudron.
All the static code needed, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP is inside the Docker container of the Cloudron app in read-only mode.
This is not needed in the backup, because why? It exists in the Docker container and can be downloaded over and over again and will stay 1 to 1 the same.
But your data, what makes your Webpage, that is something unique and needs to be backed up.
All Cloudron apps are designed this way to reduce the backup footprint to only include what really is needed to restore.

So on a restore, Cloudron can simply download the docker image of the LAMP App, take your specific app backup and place it where it belongs so it works again.

[jdaviescoates]

@charlesnw I (and many others here) have repeatedly migrated my entire server from one VPS to another with no data loss.

[joseph]

@charlesnw said in Cloudron backups - user database and email:

Only the database and app user data is backed up

where is this? if it's misleading, we should fix it.

edit: nevermind, found it in https://docs.cloudron.io/backups/ . There is a whole lot of context around that sentence and should not be read independently.

[jdaviescoates]

@joseph said in Cloudron backups - user database and email:

here is a whole lot of context around that sentence and should be read independently.

It should NOT be read independently.

Nevertheless, seems to me worth updating it to make it as clear as possible and to avoid future confusion.

[charlesnw]

How can I restore the user database ? How can I restore an individual email account?
What is the backup frequency of email and the user database?

These are key questions for using this in the enterprise. My board of directors wants a better understanding of the backup and restore capabilities of Cloudron as we move into production.

[joseph]

@jdaviescoates ha ha , careless typo

[joseph]

@charlesnw I think the best approach is to do a restore yourself to understand how it all works . See https://docs.cloudron.io/backups/#restore-cloudron .

For backup frequency, see https://docs.cloudron.io/backups/#schedule

To overall explain backups:

Cloudron Backup = Box backup + Email backup + App backups

The box backup has many things including users, domains, profiles, settings, apps installed, backup i.e everything you do in the dashboard . Email backup is the emails (just that) . App backups is each app backed up separately. Together, all these backups form a single Cloudron backup.

We are yet to hit a situation to restore user database separately. Not sure why this is needed but you can restore the full cloudron from Cloudron backup if your server hard disk crashes . You can also restore individual apps. This is needed often when an app update went wrong.

There is no UI to restore an individual email account. Not sure why this is needed (can someone even delete all their emails by "accident" ?) But you can just copy that single mailbox from the email backup into the live cloudron instance to restore. There is no magic here, you can just open the backups and see what's inside them.