This topic covers Ubersmith's disaster recovery best practices. The best practices are recommended when preparing for an Ubersmith installation or upgrade, and dealing with hardware failures or data corruption.

Platform

Ubersmith and its related components are continuously being updated and upgraded, therefore ensuring your platform adheres to our system requirements is recommended.

Data Backup

The most critical aspect of the Ubersmith install is the database. To ensure the integrity of your data:

• Perform daily database backups using mysqldump.
  mysqldump effectively backs up databases to prevent total data loss in the event that the instance host and/or appliance is compromised. 

  mysqldump must be invoked every time you make a backup.

• Save a copy of your database to a secure host.

• Configure MySQL replication on a separate host.
  This allows you to offload some queries to the MySQL slave, which can improve performance.

• Use a commercial backup solution, such as R1Soft, which is fully integrated with Ubersmith.

Backing Up the Ubersmith Instance Host

The Ubersmith software is easily replaced, as all data is stored in the database. Backing up the Ubersmith files themselves is not critical. If you have custom scripts or other files added to your Ubersmith install, ensure they are backed up or located in an external source control application such as SVN or CVS.

Run mysqldump

mysqldump --opt --quote-names -u user -p database > backup.sql

• Replace user and database with the appropriate names for your configuration.
• Your database dump will be written to a new file, backup.sql.
• The database name and user for your instance can be parsed from the config.ini.php file in your web root. 

Backing Up the Ubersmith Appliance

These files store the collected bandwidth, power, environmental, and other data stored by your instance, and are vital to the proper processing of bandwidth billing and other monitoring capabilities within Ubersmith.

Run backup_rrds.sh

/use/local/ubersmith/backup_rrds.ssh

• The appliance's database name is normally set as uberapp.
• Should be present for hosts provisioned after 7/2016
• Creates a tar file of the appliance's RRD files.
•  Save everything in the following directory: /home/uberm/appliance/rrds/ 

Restoring Backups

If you need to restore your instance from a backup, Ubersmith Support will assist you to restore and process our databases. We will need a host with a bare OS install and a copy of your database. Depending on the size of your database, restoration will take between 10 minutes to over an hour, for large databases (multiple GB in size). 

Related Topics 

System Requirements