Add a prompt (even an aggressive prompt) to backup before updating

[jericson (Jon Ericson)]

Continuing the discussion from Fix Discourse installation on Digital Ocean that broke during Docker update:

@jericson

Make a backup before doing anything! I wonder if there should be a warning in the interface strongly recommending a backup before you can do an update.

While helping someone restore a production system that had some issue doing an update and needed to be restored from backup, I realized the Docker Manager plugin doesn’t prompt admins to do a backup. One place that might make sense is in a warning on /admin/update:

The link would go to /admin/backups.

But I’d go further and put dialog box to slow people down a step before doing something potentially dangerous:

I could see not doing either of these things if the backup is recent. From my perspective, “recent” means a few minutes. But my threshold could be very different than yours. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In any case, I think it would be useful to include a timestamp for the most recent backup on the page where the “Start Updating” button sits:

That way there’s a chance the admin will have the information they need to decide whether they are ready to update.

[anon48433008]

1000% in favor of this idea having been though losing a weeks worth of content after a failed update led to no other choice but to restore a backup, even after that its to tempting to see the update notification and click it without doing an up to date back up.

One of my five votes surely goes here.