What are the best practices for bamboo backup?
Asked by vdastpak:

Our Bamboo server runs off an external SQL Server, which is backed up regularly every night. We have also set up Bamboo to run biweekly backups on a remote file system. Is this necessary? Can I safely disable these backups since they interfer with my nightly builds?

Thanks.


Answers:
author: Przemek Bruski
body: If you back up your DB anyway, you can disable the Bamboo's internal backup as long as you back up Bamboo's home directory separately.

You don't have to stop Bamboo to back up the home directory - if there are any inconsistencies on the FS in case of failure, they will be easy to solve.

comments: author: vdastpak
body: Thanks.

I haven't seen any settings for backing up the home directory, so I assume this should be handled outside Bamboo. Correct?


author: Przemek Bruski
body: Right. You can just rsync it.


author: Antonio B De Leon
body: @Przemyslaw Bruski Will you please confirm that this information is still valid? My team is putting together a DR recovery plan that includes Bamboo. We have the database hosted externally on a SQL server with good backup/restore practices in place. We are switching off of the "Scheduled Backup" option on Bamboo to a method that involves us backing up the server's home directory on the file system to another location. In our scenario, we lose the server and bring up a new one from a stale template (maybe weeks old). So long as the only changes to occur on the server have been within the Bamboo UI, would it be safe to assume that restoring the home directory from a backup will allow Bamboo to function even though the database would still be in a current state but the home directory would be maybe a day old?


author: Przemek Bruski
body: Some thing will go missing (artifacts/logs/successful test results) or go stale (administration configuration changes), but yes, everything should still work.Bamboo upgrades and plugin upgrades are special cases: you need to make sure backup gets refreshed after Bamboo upgrade and installation of plugins.


author: Antonio B De Leon
body: @Przemyslaw Bruski Thank you for your response.


author: Yogesh Mude
body: HI [@Przemek Bruski](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/781481)

Actually, we want to take backup of bamboo home dir but when i was looking into the bamboo home size its showing more 100+GB (includes artifacts and all).

Is there any way that we can take only bamboo plans backup so that when we run that plan it will generate the artifact and using plan backup we should restore our data when there is something went wrong.

What are the directories that i need to take the backup of bamboo home so that using which we can restore it back whenever we required and it should contain less space.

Any suggestions are welcome....


author: jovaltech
body: According to the cloning documentation here : <https://confluence.atlassian.com/bamboo/cloning-a-bamboo-instance-289277407.html?_ga=2.71256912.1302185969.1579448921-1266031545.1576069116>

"You can reduce the size of a compressed `<bamboo-production-home>`file by deleting the `xml-data/build-dir` directory that contains working copies of the checked-out sources."

So it should be ok to restore a backup without this folder, at least it worth trying because this folder should take something like 80% of the size of the entire bamboo home folder.

We will test it soon in my project, i'll come back with some infos after the restore test.


author: jovaltech
body: After restore the instance is ok, so i can confirm no need to backup the /build-dir if you don't need builds history on your backup.


author: Sultan Maiyaki
body: Backups are generally very useful for fallback reason should anything unexpected happens. Therefore disabling might not be an option but you can choose to use the native database backup tools or the dump of the database as an alternative.

comments: author: James Brown
body: Is it possible to live backup the SQL Database while Bamboo is still running?


Tags: backup

database