Overview

New in version 2.0, pulse™ now supports automatic backup of your server configuration. These backups are stored in $PULSE_DATA/archives.

Full Backups Note that these backups do not contain any server state information. In particular, they do not contain build history. Thus these backups are not a replacement for a full backup strategy.

Default Configuration

By default, pulse™ is configured to backup the current server configuration at 5am every morning. Only the last nine backup archives will be kept – older ones are removed when performing the next backup.

Cron Configuration

The backup schedule is controlled via a single cron string. If you are unfamiliar with cron expressions, refer to the Project Cron Triggers page for an overview.

What is contained in these backups?

As mentioned previously, these backups are not exhaustive backups of pulse™ and it's data. In particular, they do not include the content from the database, the installed plugins and they do not include any generated artifacts. If you wish to keep a complete backup of your pulse™ installation, you will need to backup your database and keep snapshots of the PULSE_DATA directory.

Backing up the database

This is totally dependent upon which database you are using. If you are running on the embedded database, you can back it up by taking snapshots of the PULSE_DATA/database directory. If you are running an external database, please refer to database's documentation.

Backing up the PULSE_DATA directory

Backing up the PULSE_DATA directory is a simple case of taking a snapshot of the directory. If you do not wish to backup the artifacts generated by the projects, either because you store them elsewhere or they are too large for a backup, you can exclude them by ignoring the PULSE_DATA/projects directory.

If you intend to back up the PULSE_DATA directory whilst pulse™ is running, it is recommended that you do so doing a quite period (of possible), since a running installation will make regular changes to the content of the PULSE_DATA directory.

Restoring a backup

To restore an automatic backup, you need to start pulse™ with the --restore command line option. For example:

$PULSE2_HOME/bin/pulse start --restore=/path/to/backup.zip

Once started, pulse™ will prompt you to go to the web UI and follow the instructions. In particular, pulse™ will display details of what is being restored and ask for confirmation that you wish to proceed.

If you are restoring to a backup from an older version of pulse™, you may find that once the restoration is complete, pulse™ will start an upgrade. Just follow the on screen prompts until the upgrade is complete. Once done, pulse™ will start up and your restoration will be complete.

Restore the backup into the same installation Because the backup process only backs up the configuration data, it is important that when you restore a backup, it is into the same version of pulse™ that generated the backup. If you want to restore to a different version, you will need a snapshot of the PULSE_DATA directory and the database contents for that version.