In need of an Incremental Backup strategy for Disaster Recovery Setup.

[Syedjunaid]

Hello Everyone,

I have deployed Alfresco v6.0.a (Dockerized) in a production eviornment for a local company. They have two servers on which Alfresco is running, one is Live server which is mainly used and another is for Disaster Recovery (Incase live server crashes they can manually start the alfresco docker containers and work on it for the time being). Both servers OS is Redhat. I have setup rsync cron jobs to replicate Content and Indexes, so any changes done one Live could be replicated to DR. For Database I have configured postgres replication. Now the whole process mentioned above is a DR setup as Content, Indexes and Databases are being replicated but this is kind an out of the box replication setup.

The setup I mentioned is working for me but in terms of any kind of network disconnectivity or network latency issue, the cron job can be failed, which can lead to non-availability of content and indexes on DR.

So the question arises " is there any other tool or any other strategy that I can use for the Incremental Synchronization  of Content and Indexes from Live to DR ?" 

Any kind of help or suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Regards,

Syed Junaid Hussain

[EddieMay]

Hi @Syedjunaid 

One of our engineers suggested looking at rsync but this is not an out-of-the-box solution, you will need to do your own research - there are a number of posts in the hub about this topic including: here, here, here, and here.

Let us know how you get on.

Best wishes

[cesarista]

Hi:

One possibility is to use BART:

https://blyx.com/open-source-contributions/alfresco-bart/

Other simple tool for using incremental backups (based on rsync) is for example BackupPC. You need also to dump your database previously (and daily SOLR backup folders too).

If you prefer something more scriptable, there are other tools like duplicity, rsnapshot, dar..

Regards.

--C.

[Syedjunaid]

Hi @EddieMay 

Thank you for your concern and suggestion. I also wanted to ask something and it is that "On daily basis hundreds of documents are added into Alfresco on the company's Live server and day by day the size of the data i-e Content,Index and Database is gradually increasing, so in future the size could go upto 500 gb of data. Now what can I do to sync content icrementally from Live to DR? Note that both servers are located on the same network. I am currently using rsync , rather than rsync is there any specific method or tool that I can use for the incremental synchronization of data from Live to DR server ?

Regards

Syed Junaid Hussain

[akash251998]

HI @Syedjunaid i also have the same requirement but i dont know how to do replication from one server to another. Can you help me in this regard so that i can achieve my requirement.

Any help will be appreciated.

Regards

Akash

[Syedjunaid]

Hi @akash251998 ,

For the replication process, I simply configured a cron job which replicates content and indexes from my Master to Slave. I am using linux, so with the help of rsync I simply synced my repository folder (content) and search folder (index) to same repo and search  folders on slave. Look up how to rsync files to remote server on google ( if you're using linux) and if you're running alfresco on docker, you need to mount your docker containers to a host directory. That host directory will sync to remote server.

Incase if you're unable to understand the above scenario, email me at "junaid.hussain@virtuosoft.pk". I will send you the complete documentation of replication process.

Regards,

Syed Junaid