Hello people, I need your help, I’m new to this, I’m setting up my community on my server, I have questions about the backup, how can I configure it to do it 3 times a day? and is this backup safe? If something happens to my server, can I migrate my entire community with all settings to another server?
You can’t do that (without resorting to complicated custom scripts)
Yes, as long as you store it somewhere else (like on S3)
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I understand, I think it’s a little safe to only have one backup per day, if the community is very busy there is a risk of losing data since the closest backup could take 24 hours… Returning to the subject, can you tell me if adding an S3 bucket the Backup files go directly to S3 or are they also saved on the machine where the speech is hosted?
They’re first saved on the machine, then uploaded (and removed from the machine).
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I understand, in my case this solution does not work, it will be unsafe.
What is unsafe about s3?
If you don’t trust it for some reason you could use local storage and rsync the files elsewhere. But that would be less safe than s3.
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The insecurity I’m referring to is not S3, but in the discourse itself, the minimum backup time is 1 day, but if you analyze this period for the next backup, there may be a problem or situation on the server or file itself, so if it is a very busy community you may lose some data
If you cannot afford the probability of such data loss you should invest in a database setup that replicates to another hosting provider or availability zone. But these things do come with a price tag.
When performing risk management, the risk of something going wrong is the likelihood times the impact. If you want to decrease the risk, you can either decrease the likelihood of the disaster, or the impact.
Having more frequent backups is a measure that decreases the impact. You could also consider decreasing the likelihood - for instance by getting more reliable hosting.
In the past 10 years of hosting many, many Discourse forums with Communiteq we have never had an case where we wished we would have had more frequent backups.
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I’m new to discourse, so what you said I didn’t understand very well
He’s saying that in ten years of running hundreds of forums he’s never wished he had more frequent backups.
If your data is very valuable then you can configure postgres to replicate to another server so that you can switch to a hot backup and lose no it very little data. You can Google “postgres replication”. I would guess it would take you a day or two to set up and another few days to make sure that you really understand how to switch to the backup server.
You could also make a cron job that would run the backup every ten minutes and have those backups in s3.
The recommendation, though, is to find something else to worry about.
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I understand, okay, I’ll see what’s best to do
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I just can’t understand this why so many is against easy database backup more often. What’s behind it? Please, explain to me why with Discourse max 24 hours cap is not threat but it is everywhere else. My WordPress/Woocommerce does backups of database every 5 minutes and it has basically zero price tag.
From the very beginning of digital world there has been two universal truths:
- backups are quite often too old
- making backups must be automatic, because relying on human is guaranteed way to forget it
I also can’t understand how they can’t see risks in a backup that runs every 24 hours, during this period large losses of sensitive information can occur.
If you want to create backups more often, you can create a cron script to do it or create a plugin that will do it more often. If you’re going to make backups more often, you’ll want to see that uploads are on s3, as making copies of the uploads with every backup is expensive.
Cdck/discourse.org makes backups twice daily, I believe. They do it with some external script.
If you don’t want to figure out how to manage postgres backups you can ask in marketplace with a budget and say whether you’d rather a plugin creates backups or you get help with postgres to script postgres database backups or discourse backups.
That’s not a native wordpress feature, though, is it? It’s a plugin, right?
But the point is that making more frequent backups is probably unnecessary, at least in the experience of some people who have managed many discourse forums for many years.
But we are talking about database here. Backuping uploads to S3 every few minutes is just stupid.
But still I would like to hear why this is so big question.
There is no in-build solution by Autommatic at all. But there is a plenty options why there is no need to build such functionality. The whole ecosystem is different and Discourse as an environment is lacking such variety totally. Everything here is strongly build on B2B, I know it, and there is no need nor want to develop similar customer level solution than WordPress and its plugins are.
All I want to know what is the real reason why this is so hard question.
I’m not against it. I just don’t think I need it, and never needed it.
It wouldn’t be very hard or much work to create a plugin that does it. However, no one has built it. That’s probably a sign that it’s not that important to many 
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Yes the real test of any requirement is either CDCK pick it up or someone posts in marketplace with a meaningful budget.