Installation

Backup strategies for WeBWorK

Backup strategies for WeBWorK

by Danny Glin -
Number of replies: 2
Having just had to restore an assignment that was accidentally unassigned from students after it was completed got me thinking about backups and WeBWorK.

As part of our installation here, I have scheduled a nightly dump of the WeBWorK database using mysqldump.  We also have the courses directory being backed up nightly using our tape backup system.

On several occasions the database dumps have come in very handy to recreate assignments that were accidentally deleted.  I can't recall ever having to restore anything from the courses directory, but could see a circumstance where a user would want to retrieve a problem file that was accidentally deleted.

I'm curious whether anyone else does scheduled backups, including what they use, and if they have an easy process for restoring data.

Danny
In reply to Danny Glin

Re: Backup strategies for WeBWorK

by Lars Jensen -
Hi Danny,

We do a mysqldump of the database every night, plus I make a tarball of the /webwork2, /pg and /courses directory, leaving out tmp sub directories. We also make a nightly tarball backup of my /etc directory. The daily backups are over-written after a week, but I also save a monthly backup, so I have back-ups for a year back. Then I rsync these back-ups to a machine in another location for storage. 

This makes restoring webwork data easy. I don't back up the server.

Lars.
In reply to Danny Glin

Re: Backup strategies for WeBWorK

by Davide Cervone -
I also do essentially what you do: nightly mysqldumps and nightly incremental backups, with weekly full backups. These are transferred to another machine nightly, but are not stored on other media. I used to do DVD backups, but don't any longer.

I have never had to recover the database, so don't have anything written for that. My backup software have recovery components, so getting the files back is no problem.