I'm setting up my first Ghost blog right now and trying to figure out: what is the best way to routinely backup my content using an automated script?
I see many posts online about how to manually backup the contents, and some scripts to do this. However, they all involve stopping the Node/Ghost processes while running a script to backup the database. Is there any way to do an automated backup without stopping Ghost?
Unfortunately, right now you cannot automate the backup without shutting down Ghost. This is because it isn't smart to be copying the database while it could be being read/written to. A script that stops Ghost, makes a copy, and starts it back up would prob only ~1 second of down time, so if you have times that are slower, you could probably get away with it. If you can't, then just do the manual export for all the post data, and have a script backup all your images.
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I am working on a task to be able to backup VM image volumes in another server and location, the problem is, I don't want to copy the whole image file each time I want to start a backup job, I want to backup the whole image only once and then backup incrementally each time I want to do a backup from a vm.
Is there anyway to do that? I don't want to use snapshots because when the number of snapshots increases, it will have an impact on volume performance.
If there is another way or if there is a way to use snapshots more efficient, please tell me.
I have tried volume snapshot locally, I want to know how to do it externally or any other sufficient ways to do incremental external backups.
ive been working on a project allowing you to create full and incremental or differential backups of libvirt/kvm based virtual machines. It works by using the latest features provided by the libvirt and qemu projects (changed block tracking). So if the libvirt/qemu versions you are using are supporting the features, you might want to give it a try:
https://github.com/abbbi/virtnbdbackup
When I develop and update files on production server with PHP I just copy the files on the fly and everything seems to work without interrupting the server.
But if I am to update the code on the Go server and application and would need to kill the server, copy the src files to the server, run go install, and then start the server, this would interrupt the service, and if I do this quite often then it is going to look very bad for my users of the service.
How can I update files without the downtime when using Go with Go's http server?
PHP is an interpreted language, which means you provide your code in source format and the PHP interpreter will read it and execute it (it may create a more compact binary form so that it doesn't have to analyze the source again when needed).
Go is a compiled language, it compiles into a native executable binary; going further it is statically linked which means every code and library your app is referring to is compiled and linked when the executable is created. This implies you can't just "drop-in" new go modules into a running application.
You have to stop your running application and start the new version. You can however minimize the downtime: only stop the running application when the new version of the executable is already created and ready to be run. You may choose to compile it on a remote machine and upload the binary to the server, or upload the source and compile it on the server, it doesn't matter.
With this you could decrease the downtime to a maximum of few seconds, which your users won't notice. Also you shouldn't update in every hour, you can't really achieve significant updates in just an hour of coding. You could schedule updates daily (or even less frequently), and you could schedule them for hours when your traffic is low.
If even a few seconds downtime is not acceptable to you, then you should look for platforms which handle this for you automatically without any downtime. Check out Google App Engine - Go for example.
The grace library will allow you to do graceful restarts without annoyance for your users: https://github.com/facebookgo/grace
Yet in my experience restarting Go applications is so quick, unless you have an high traffic website it won't cause any trouble.
First of all, don't do it in that order. Copy and install first. Then you could stop the old process and run the new one.
If you run multiple instances of your app, then you can do a rolling update, so that when you bounce one server, the other ones are still serving. A similar approach is to do blue-green deployments, which has the advantage that the code your active cluster is running is always homogeneous (whereas during a rolling deploy, you'll have a mixture until they've all rolled), and you can also do a blue-green deployment where you normally have only one instance of your app (whereas rolling requires more than one). It does however require you to have double the instances during the blue-green switch.
One thing you'll want to take into consideration is any in-flight requests -- you may want to make sure that in-flight requests continue to go to old-code servers until their finished.
You can also look into Platform-as-a-Service solutions, that can automate a lot of this stuff for you, plus a whole lot more. That way you're not ssh'ing into production servers and copying files around manually. The 12 Factor App principles are always a good place to start when thinking about ops.
A couple of questions:
1) How can I update a Classic ASP website/page without interrupting service (users getting an error or service unavailable message) or shutting the website down temporarily?
2) When updating/restoring a MSSQL DB via SQL Server Management Studio, will the website users get an error message?
Thanks in advance.
A smart practice is to use at least one separate development environment with the same setup as your production environment and debug all changes there to ensure that they work. Once your entire site is running and tested on the other, identical environment to your production environment, you should be able to simply move the files and they should work in production. This model being effective is dependent on actually being able to maintain environments as close to identical to each other as possible.
When updating/restoring a MSSQL DB
Be careful with your terminology; UPDATE and RESTORE are two very different commands.
If the database is locked by the changes being made, then it will be inaccessible to users and may cause error messages depending on your IIS and code setup. Scheduling a maintenance period and blocking user access to any pages that access the database is will help avoid messy errors and revealing any information about your infrastructure while the changes are being made.
It seems like you might want to do some basic research on development and databases both in order to make sure you understand what you're doing and can cover all of your bases. Looking up commands like RESTORE and UPDATE and using them correctly is crucial.
For example, when you rewrite one or more of your website files
via FTP, in that very moment when rewriting is taking place,
users will get a 500 Service Unavailable error. How can I avoid this?
This really shouldn't happen, although you could upload the files to a different folder, avoiding any delay there, and sync the files with a diff tool such as Winmerge (also helping you keep track of changes and revert quickly) when done uploading.
I never know what to do when my Wordpress installation tells me there's an update available. I am using version 2.8 so whenever there is an update, all I have to do is click update, some magic happens behind the scenes, and it gets updated. But should I create backup files? And how? I have custom themes and plugins that I don't want to get lost because I don't have backups! Is it safe to assume that nothing bad will happen when you click the upgrade button? What is your process when you decide to upgrade to the newest version?
Backup the database, wp-content directory and configuration files first.
There are plug-ins to make this easier, but since you're asking on StackOverflow, I'll assume you could write a script to do it yourself. While you're at it, add the script as a cron job.
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups#Backup_Resources
Always backup before making a big change like that.
You'll want to copy all your files to a safe place via FTP. Copy 'em, zip 'em up, and keep them somewhere safe where you can remember where they are. You'll also want to backup or "export" the database and keep that also safe. This way if something goes wrong, you can restore it to the way it was.
There's a good backup script here for Wordpress sites:
http://www.guyrutenberg.com/2008/05/07/wordpress-backup-script/
based on Bash and bzip2.
I usually don't update nothing in production without testing it first, unless is a simple modification and is about security (like the 2.8.4 update).
The ideal thing to do is create a separate installation to be a test server: can be in your local machine, or just a whole different installation in your server. Why? Remember you have plugins installed and some may break, updating everything can't be a "blind" decision!
So, before updating in the production installation/server, always test in the "test environment".
Nothing is worse than having your website down because of an update error.
I have a great deal of data to keep synchronized over 4 or 5 sites around the world, around half a terabyte at each site. This changes (either adds or changes) by around 1.4 Gigabytes per day, and the data can change at any of the four sites.
A large percentage (30%) of the data is duplicate packages (Perhaps packaged-up JDKs), so the solution would have to include a way of picking up the fact that there are such things lying aruond on the local machine and grab them instead of downloading from another site.
The control of versioning is not an issue, this is not a codebase per-se.
I'm just interested if there are any solutions out there (preferably open-source) that get close to such a thing?
My baby script using rsync doesn't cut the mustard any more, I'd like to do more complex, intelligent synchronization.
Thanks
Edit : This should be UNIX based :)
Have you tried Unison?
I've had good results with it. It's basically a smarter rsync, which maybe is what you want. There is a listing comparing file syncing tools here.
Sounds like a job for BitTorrent.
For each new file at each site, create a bittorrent seed file and put it into centralized web-accessible dir.
Each site then downloads (via bittorrent) all files. This will gen you bandwidth sharing and automatic local copy reuse.
Actual recipe will depend on your need.
For example, you can create 1 bittorrent seed for each file on each host, and set modification time of the seed file to be the same as the modification time of the file itself. Since you'll be doing it daily (hourly?) it's better to use something like "make" to (re-)create seed files only for new or updated files.
Then you copy all seed files from all hosts to the centralized location ("tracker dir") with option "overwrite only if newer". This gets you a set of torrent seeds for all newest copies of all files.
Then each host downloads all seed files (again, with "overwrite if newer setting") and starts bittorrent download on all of them. This will download/redownload all the new/updated files.
Rince and repeat, daily.
BTW, there will be no "downloading from itself", as you said in the comment. If file is already present on the local host, its checksum will be verified, and no downloading will take place.
How about something along the lines of Red Hat's Global Filesystem, so that the whole structure is split across every site onto multiple devices, rather than having it all replicated at each location?
Or perhaps a commercial network storage system such as from LeftHand Networks (disclaimer - I have no idea on cost, and haven't used them).
You have a lot of options:
You can try out to set up replicated DB to store data.
Use combination of rsync or lftp and custom scripts, but that doesn't suit you.
Use git repos with max compressions and sync between them using some scripts
Since the amount of data is rather large, and probably important, do either some custom development on hire an expert ;)
Check out super flexible.... it's pretty cool, haven't used it in a large scale environment, but on a 3-node system it seemed to work perfectly.
Sounds like a job for Foldershare
Have you tried the detect-renamed patch for rsync (http://samba.anu.edu.au/ftp/rsync/dev/patches/detect-renamed.diff)? I haven't tried it myself, but I wonder whether it will detect not just renamed but also duplicated files. If it won't detect duplicated files, then, I guess, it might be possible to modify the patch to do so.