EMEN2 Maintenance and Backups

An EMEN2 installation consists of several components:

EMEN2 Database Environment

There are several ways to backup your EMEN2 database environment.

In the simplest case, you can perform a normal copy of the database environment. This is a "cold backup", and is the easiest and most reliable mechanism, but requires that you stop all database writes for the duration of the process to ensure the integrity of the archive (see "long answer"). If your uptime requirements are not stringent, performing cold backups once a night or once a week using normal shell tools (see simple answer below) may be all you need.

If you want to perform very frequent backups, or do not want to stop the database environment, you can perform a "hot backup," which can be performed even while the database is active.

File Storage Area, Logs, etc.

The other directories are just normal files on disk and can handled with standard shell tools.

Backup: Simple Answer

Shutdown the web server (see EMEN2/emen2control.py) and perform a normal cold backup of everything by rsync'ing to a remote backup server. This will be sufficient for most installations.

Example (default config, everything in /home/emen2):

[emen2@ncmidb ~/emen2]# python ./emen2control.py --shutdown
[emen2@ncmidb ~/emen2]# python ./emen2control.py --recover
[emen2@ncmidb ~]# cd /home/emen2/
[emen2@ncmidb ~]# rsync -vr db db_backup log_archive applog emen2files emen2tiles emen2 emen2@remotebackup:~/emen2backup/
        ....

Hot backup, incremental backup, log files, etc.

For a more detailed discussion, see Backup Discussion