Introducing: Planned Backup

Server Backup, Workaround

Our infrastructure runs Amazon ec2 multi-AZ feature. This means that the data is backed up in multiple sites of amazon across the world.

More details provided on Amazon IaaS website: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/

What does “backup” mean?

According to TechTarget: “Backup is the activity of copying files or databases so that they will be preserved in case of equipment failure or other catastrophes. Backup is usually a routine part of the operation of large businesses with mainframes as well as the administrators of smaller business computers. For personal computer users, backup is also necessary but often neglected. The retrieval of files you backed up is called restoring them.”

Read more on Techtarget website: http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/backup)

Our Policy, Exit Strategy

We want our customers to be (feel) free and independent from our service. They can leave this feature any time they want and continue with another cloud service or private software solution. Cloudempiere promises their customers reliable backup functionality on a daily, weekly, or another time basis.

How to do that?

After customers set up their accounts, they can plan their data backup policy.

Steps:

After logging into the cloud system on the panel customers can find the [backup Data] icon. By clicking on this icon the customers can set up their backup settings based on their data retention strategy. Customers are entitled to use Predefined Backup schemes, or create a custom one.

Components

1. Backup Scheme – It describes data format including SQL queries to get the proper data.
2. Backup Workflows - These are tasks in which the power users define one-time or periodic backup processes.
3. Backup History/Instances – This is about storing all export information instances containing users´ data and so on.

Workflow

After the account is ready, we need to set up the backup strategy. Depending on the backup task conditions the Cloudempiere starts the backup process and stores data on Amazon S3 encrypted bucket (expiration date). After data is stored an email is sent to the mail address of the power user with a ZIP FILE. This file is available only for a limited time and includes XML files about the backup scheme with all the security settings needed. {schema: backup-workflow} – todo: needs to be re-drawed.

What to do after the customer got the data?

Suggestions

1. save it safely – there are many options from Local CD/DVD/Blu-ray/NAS disks to cloud-based providers like the box, dropbox, azure, and so on. 2. use it for migration – processing for other local reporting. Use tools, which can read XML files.

Read more about the topic here:

• http://www.wikihow.com/Open-XML
• http://www.pcworld.com/article/123796/article.html

Future Plans

Depending on the future interests we are thinking about implementing multiple format support like JSON or CSV. The Initial Release doesn´t support attachments.