MangoApps on-premise domain backup best practices

This article will walk you through backing up the 2 key parts of your MangoApps domain: the MangoApps Content and MangoApps Documents. An article for restoring files and data from backup to your MangoApps domain may also be of interest. A separate article covers changing your MangoApps Domain URL.

There are two parts to full recovery.

1. MangoApps Software & Configuration settings.

2. User data residing either in the MangoApps database or in the SAN storage you specify.

To make sure MangoApps is setting the right expectations:

• • Software and Configuration settings: MangoApps deploys software using a centralized MangoApps Deployment Server. The software and configuration settings are backed up by MangoApps and can easily be restored to your MangoApps server.

  • User data: On-premise customers backup their MangoApps servers / virtual machines and are responsible for ensuring backups are proper. Although MangoApps can assist you with initial setup of backups, MangoApps does not monitor backup for on-premise customers on an on-going basis. Also, frequency of data backup determines the amount of “potential” data loss, e.g. if you backup the MySQL database on a nightly basis, it is possible that you could lose up to 24 hours of user data (the difference between the last backup and the recovery needed).

Some MangoApps customers back up their entire VMs on a nightly basis. Others do a backup multiple times per day based on their business needs.

What MangoApps can offer is configuring a nightly cron job to backup the SAN storage and MySQL database to an FTP location you provide. But MangoApps won’t be able to monitor the backup for you on an on-going basis.

Backing up MangoApps content

1. Finding the current DB backup The content in MangoApps is automatically backed up every 24 hours via a Cron job. To manually back up the content in MangoApps at any time you can execute this command at the command line of the MangoApps Appliance: sudo /opt/mango/bin/mangodb.sh -d backupThe result of executing this command is a dump of the database written to the following directory (or the directory that is customized for your deployment): /opt/mango/db/archive/The SQL dump file name is in the format below and contains the YYYYMMDD date and HHMMSS time: mangoapps-127.0.0.1-20121129-113043.mangodb

   Please read and follow this article to restore your MangoApps content from a MangoApps Database backup

Backing up your MangoApps documents

There are two choices in MangoApps for the storage of documents: “Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)” and “Storage Area Network (SAN)”.

Depending on which one is configured there are separate backup steps required.

1. If your MangoApps domain is configured to use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) backup For backup from S3, you must provide your own custom S3 account configuration from the “Change S3 Account” option.

Once you have registered your S3 account through Amazon, you can download your documents using an S3 client application.

2. If your MangoApps domain is configured to use storage area network (SAN) backup: Simply move the files from the configured “SAN location” to a server or disk location that you choose. You should compress the files in the top-level directory recursively to minimize the size of the file transfer and to maintain the necessary directory structure.

You can compress the top level folder with a command like this: tar -zcvf opt_mango_storage.tar.gz /opt/mango/storageThe result of the command will be an archive file in the directory you were in when executing the command. You can move this archive to your new MangoApps server and uncompress it to migrate and restore your MangoApps Files to your new server.

Please note that files stored in SAN are not automatically backed up. We assume that you do that using whatever utilities necessary to back up your SAN.

3. It is easy to add a Cron task to backup files stored on SAN to another location (as long the drive is mounted) as well. Let us know if you would like us to do that for you and the location of the backup and we will be happy to add that.