Better known as: Backups without Ansible.
We are considering getting rid of our Ansible-managed servers as we move to Heroku. This means that we can no longer rely on certain backup mechanisms which were performed by cron jobs installed by Ansible.Backups and Recovery contains a summary of our pre-Heroku backup infrastructure.
Original files and derivatives
These are stored in S3, are backed up within S3 by a process managed by AWS, and are pulled from S3 to Dubnium. No Ansible cron jobs are used in this workflow, and and there is thus no need to make any changes to our existing setup.
Database backups
A script on the production server, home/ubuntu/bin/postgres-backup.sh, performed the following tasks nightly:
pg_dumpthe production database to/backups/pgsql-backup/.aws s3 syncthe contents of that directory tos3://chf-hydra-backup/PGSql.
The above script will need to be discarded.
A second cronjob running on our dubnium backup server then copies the S3 file to a local network storage mount. This then gets backed up to tape.
Heroku database backup commands
It’s easy to setup a regular database backup in Heroku, as follows:
heroku pg:backups:schedule DATABASE_URL --at '02:00 America/New_York'
You can check the metadata on the latest backups as follows:
$ heroku pg:backups=== BackupsID Created at Status Size Database──── ───────────────────────── ─────────────────────────────────── ─────── ────────a006 2020-12-14 07:30:18 +0000 Completed 2020-12-14 07:30:56 +0000 64.37MB DATABASE
heroku pg:backups:download a006 will produce a “logical” database dump – a binary file – that can easily be converted to a “physical” (i.e. garden variety SQL file) dump as follows: pg_restore -f mydatabase.sql latest.dump.
More simply, you can run: curl -o 'latest.dump' heroku pg:backups:url to get the latest logical dump.
Heroku retains daily backups for 7 days, and weekly backups for 4 weeks.