How to make offsite backup?

[mkuthan]

How to make automated offsite backup?

I've already had configured rclone to synchronize local files to the cloud. But how to dump/export Gramps database and media on the machine where grampsweb is running automatically? With such automated dump/export, I could schedule rclone to sync it to the cloud easily.

Alternatively I could synchronize gramps-db and gramps-media volumes (do I need something else?). But how to recover such backup then?

Thanks in advance!

[DavidMStraub]

Hi,

it's something we should document better indeed.

Concerning backing up whole volumes, it's a docker question not specific to Gramps Web, so let's not dive into it. It's possible, but depends a lot on the exact setup (which database backend, etc.).

The easiest route is to back up directly via the Web API by automating the steps here https://www.grampsweb.org/administration/export/#back-up-your-family-tree

Personally, I have not felt the need to do this because I use the sync addon and all my backup strategy is for the local copy, so losing the remote server would not be an issue (except user accounts, but I don't have that many users).

[mkuthan]

Thank you for the answer. Backup is important to me because my self-hosted GrampsWeb is the only instance of the database. I replicate the VM to another server in the Proxmox cluster, but I would love to have an offsite backup as well. Building family genealogy is quite a consuming task, and I don't want to lose everything if my "datacenter" disappears.

I will try to automate the export using the REST API, but right now I make a backup manually from time to time.

[DavidMStraub]

For the database, downloading the XML is the way to go.

For media files, it's a bit more tricky. Generating a ZIP archive regularly and downloading it is not efficient. In my case, I use S3 for media file storage (https://www.grampsweb.org/install_setup/s3/), then it's very easy to back up (if needed at all).

Otherwise, an incremental sync of the media files makes much more sense than a full download. This is exactly what the sync addon does, but it would also be conceivable to have a standalone script.

[krin-san]

I just wrote a script exactly for this task: https://gist.github.com/krin-san/d12837b957de22aa10590c15a9fb3a5d

[FasteryXD]

Hey, I just wanted to run this idea by you and you, #DavidMStraub, would know best what’s right for the project.
A few days ago, I ran into an issue where HAOS 18.0 for Odroid got botched and the partitions were destroyed. Fortunately, I had set up daily backups for HAOS, so I was able to restore everything.

Personally, I don't think something like that would happen with Gramps, but you never know.
That’s why I’m wondering: could a system like the one in HAOS be implemented? Specifically, an option to schedule a backup say, around midnight to a service like Nextcloud (via WebDAV) or Google Drive. It would also be great to select exactly what gets backed up not just the family tree, but the media files as well directly within the settings.
Would something like that be possible?
I’m happy to accept whatever answer you give. Best regards.

[DavidMStraub]

Believe me, I broke my Home (Assistant) more the once so I do love this feature, and that's also what I was thinking about when I opened this feature request gramps-project/gramps-web-api#396

The scope of that issue is much narrower for now: take a downloaded backup and allow the user to restore it by uploading it.

That feature is anyway the prerequisite for a more powerful integrated backup system, so once we have it, we can think about the next step.