4.3.7 Backup & Restore

OpenCRVS is automatically configured so that your production environment, creates a backup of all data into an encrypted file on your backup environment every night. This file is then immediately restored onto your staging server.

In this way, your staging server contains citizen data that is 24 hours old. The staging server can be used as a pre-production mirror for you to test any OpenCRVS upgrades or configuration changes on real citizen data without disturbing your production environment.

If you SSH into your backup server, you will find the default of 7 days of backups in this directory.

/home/backup/backups/<date of backup>/<date of backup>.tar.gz.enc

You will see directories like this, each with an encrypted .tar.gz.enc file inside which is the backup itself.

If you wish to retain more than the default of 7 days of backup data on the backup server, edit this variable in the backup server inventory file and re-provision the backup environment:

amount_of_backups_to_keep

Before going live, it's very important that you confirm that OpenCRVS is successfully backing up and restoring. Make a test registration in production with image attachments, and wait 24 hours. This test registration should exist in your staging environment the day after you created it. "View" the registration on staging and make sure that image attachments are available. To learn more about all the technical checks that you should perform before going live with your OpenCRVS installation, read the Pre-deployment Checklist section. To reset your all your environments including production in readiness for going live, read the reset section.

Disaster Recovery

You should develop an operational process to make a hard copy of your encrypted backups on a secure peripheral such as an encrypted removable disk or hardware security module. This is in case all servers in your data centre suffer a catastrophic incident such as fire or theft. The frequency of this operational process should be related to the amount_of_backups_to_keep variable. E.G. performed once every 7 days.

Using the SSH user details for a user has permission to access the backup environment , e.g.: a user in your backup.yml inventory file, the following command will copy an encrypted backup file off the backup server and onto another environment. Perhaps it will be useful to you in an automated script or manual process.

The rsync command uses SSH as its underlying protocol to securely transfer files, so it accesses SSH key details the same way any ssh command would. It searches for private keys in standard locations (such as ~/.ssh/id_rsa, ~/.ssh/id_ed25519, etc.)

The backup file will be copied from the backup server into the local directory from which the command is run in this format: $DATE_OF_REQUIRED_BACKUP.tar.gz.enc where $DATE_OF_REQUIRED_BACKUP is in this format: YYYY-MM-DD

rsync -a -r --delete --progress --rsh="ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -p $SSH_PORT" \
  $SSH_USER@$SSH_HOST:/home/backup/backups/$DATE_OF_REQUIRED_BACKUP/${DATE_OF_REQUIRED_BACKUP}.tar.gz.enc\
  ${DATE_OF_REQUIRED_BACKUP}.tar.gz.enc

You can now restore this backup onto a newly provisioned set of OpenCRVS servers by following the steps here.