All of us agree on how much backups are important. Be it the backup of server state or user data like database backups.

Until now, Webdock provided server-level backups. These have, countless times, helped to restore the (un)accidentally deleted database data. But not always you want to restore the entire server.

With this new feature we pushed live, you can automate database backups, which will be save on to your server. In case of any unexpected event, like database corruption due to application crash or any similar issue, you can simple restore the database from these backups, without restoring the entire server 🙂

Note: This feature is available only for a server that is provisioned using our LEMP/LAMP stack image.

Configure Automated Backups

This is quite simple.

Head over to the “Databases” card for a server you want to enable database backup on. Then scroll all the way down to the Backup on Disk section.

Here you can configure where to place the backups, how many to keep (so the old are rotated to prevent disk fillup), and when to run the backup job.

How it Works

Once you configure a backup schedule, we write a cronjob to your server. This will not be visible in the Cron Jobs list in the UI, to prevent accidental cron job deletion 🙂

The cronjob automatically runs at the time you specified, backs up the non-system and system databases (along with metadata) into the respective zip files, and places them in the DB location you set.

In case our backup schedule presets don’t work for you, you can set the schedule to Manual. Then create a custom cronjob as root user that runs this command:

/root/webdock/db-backup-on-disk.sh --run

On every run of your custom cron job, backups are created and placed in the set location.

How to Restore

In the event of database corruption or accidental deletion, simply unzip the backup DB zip files and use the regular mysql commands to restore database using the SQL files.

You can refer to this article for the commands or simply ask our AI 🙂