Hello! I was thinking about our backup plan as we migrate to ERPNext and grow our business. Can anyone help me confirm my understanding? Here it is.
Backup Plan:
Create clone of server hard disk and store it in another location.
Setup dropbox backup in ERPNext.
When hardware crashes or get errors:
Insert cloned hard disk
Restore from dropbox backup
Hardware Maintenance:
Clone and change hard disk every 5 years.
Questions for confirmation and comments:
Does the dropbox backup totally restore my ERPNext settings and all its transactions?
My cloned disk has the OS and EPRNext server installed but has outdated transactions. Do i need to delete the whole company which includes old transactions, items, sales, purchases, journal entries, etc., then restore from dropbox backup (new and updated)?
Regarding Dropbox backup - It contains entire data, settings, including custom scripts /codes etc (its a database dump)
While restoring the backup the system will delete existing transactions, create a fresh instance and restore from the backup. You won’t need to manually delete the records.
I might consider hardware RAID in the future. I’m still skeptical that it would also copy corrupt/erroneous data without checking. What do you mean by master-slave?
Bases on what type of RAID Level/Configuration you are planning to do, will help you in the specific area of recovery. Each RAID level has its own advantages and disadvantages. RAID can help you get your database immediately without depending on off-site backup techniques which might take time and resources to restore data and system all together.
Mix of various Backup techniques may help businesses from serious downtime and sometimes going completely bankrupt.
Master-Slave is MySQL technique using which you can have near real-time data share from Master to Slave MySQL Server, so in short, if you Primary Database server is gone down, you can switch to Slave database or have some mechanism to do auto switch to minimize downtime to from days, hours to few minutes.
Regarding Dropbx Backup, I strongly believe Backup&Restore Drop-box plugin on Word-press is the best you can use for backing up your data. It has Unlimited dropbox backups, Unlimited dropbox restores, Unlimited local backups and Unlimited local restores. Backup & Restore Dropbox – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
I just saw someone testing hardware raid against btrfs raid in a youtube video where advantages of btrfs where pointed out.
Don’t recall 100% of the details but I think the main point was that a hardware controller will always assume the 1st copy of a file being good and restore from that (even if it was tha actual corrupted one) while btrfs actually can say which of 2 instances of a file would be the not corrupt one