Introduction
After getting your application server up and running, an important next step is to set up a backup system. A backup system will allow you to create periodic backup copies of your data, and restore data from those backups. As data can be lost due to user error or the eventual hardware failure that any computer system is prone to, you will want set up backups as a safety net.
This tutorial will show you how to create proper backups of a PHP application, running a LAMP stack on a single Ubuntu 14.04 server, by using a separate backups server that is running Bacula. One of the benefits of using a backup system like Bacula is that it gives you full control of what should be backed up and restored, at the individual file level, and the schedule of when the backups should be created. Having file-level granularity when creating backups allows us to limit our backup selections to only the files that are needed, which will save disk space compared to backing up the entire filesystem.
If this seems excessive to you, you may want to consider DigitalOcean Droplet Backups (snapshot backups of your entire Droplet), which must be enabled when you create your Droplet. These backups are easy to set up and may be sufficient for your needs if you only require weekly backups. If you opt for DigitalOcean Backups, be sure to set up hot backups of your database by following the Create Hot Backups of Your Database section—this is necessary to ensure that your database backups will be consistent (usable).
Prerequisites
This tutorial assumes that you are running a PHP application, such as WordPress, that is running on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, and PHP) stack on a single Ubuntu 14.04 server, with private networking enabled. We will refer to this as the LAMP server. For our example, we will be creating backups of a WordPress server that was created by following these tutorials:
If you are running a different PHP application, or using Nginx instead of Apache, this tutorial will still work fine assuming that you make any necessary adjustments to your backup selection.
Of course, you will need sudo access to a server that the Bacula server software will be installed on, which we’ll refer to as the backups server. Ideally, it will be in the same data center as your LAMP server, and have private networking enabled. The backups that are created will live on this server, so it will need enough disk space to store multiple copies of your backup selection.
Backup Selection
As mentioned in the introduction, our backup selection—the files that will be copied every time a backup is created—will consist only of the files that are necessary to restore your application to a previous state. In short, this means we will backup the following data:
- PHP Application Files: This will be the DocumentRoot of your web server. On Ubuntu, this will be
/var/www/htmlby default - MySQL Database: While the MySQL data files are typically stored in
/var/lib/mysql, we must create a hot backup of the database in another location. The hot backups will be part of our backup selection
As a matter of convenience, we will also include the Apache and MySQL configuration files in our backup selection. If you have any other important files, such as SSL key and certificate files, be sure to include those too.
The rest of the files on the server can be replaced by following the software installation steps of the initial setup. In the case of a server failure, we could create a replacement LAMP server by following the prerequisite tutorials then restoring the backups, and restarting the appropriate services.
If you are not sure why we are including the aforementioned files in the backup selection, check out the Recovery Planning segment of the multi-part Building for Production: Web Applications tutorial series. It describes how a recovery plan can be developed for a web application, using a multi-server setup as its example.
Let’s set up the hot backups of our database. Continue reading Back Up a LAMP Server with Bacula on Ubuntu 14.04