Backup and Restore

The most current version of FreePBX has this feature in it. After upgrading, you can go into amportal.conf and the settings for a remote FTP site are at the bottom. Then it will use the Backup schedule from the Backup and Restore page to create the file and FTP it to remote location.

-Kerry

sorry TROFFASKY,

it's called 'philippe is lazy.' as well as I personally believe gui's get overdone. Setting this up in the amportal.conf file is trivial, use your text editor as your 'gui' :-)

anyhow - the addition I made is trivial and as Kerry points out it is up on svn head at freepbx. If you really don't want to upgrade - you can simply grab ampbackup.pl off svn head and stick it into your current trixbox in place of what is there - then just add the required amporal.conf settings any you are set.

p

Under AAH Freepbx it is
/var/lib/asterisk/backups

i took a look at amportal.conf - the bottom of the file, and see nothing there regarding a remote ftp site. am i just over looking it?
(i'm using trixbox 1.1.1)

-Kerry

I also am looking for this feature. Could someone knowledgeable post a method to reliably backup the freepbx configuration so that it can be restored to a fresh installation? Thanks for your help,
-Scott

Thanks this is helpful.

We are trying auto-update a secondary Trixbox.

Do you have the backup and restore commands in a textfile? - so that we can run them in a command line script.

If we restore the files to a secondary Trixbox with a different IP do we need to change permission or anything else?

G

Thanks your comments are very helpful. In all SIP implementations we may just rely on primary and secondary SIP proxy designations (e.g. the IP phones and gateways).

The rsync philosophy is good. We want the servers to sync periodically (e.g. once a week) with no human intervention while keeping copies of the back-ups for a while. So if something goes wrong on the primary Trixbox, the automated back-up does not replicate the damaged data overwriting the only good copy on the back-up.

G

philippel,

This auto-ftp is EXACTLY what I want. I finally figured out that it's not in the currently released code (2.1.3) but rather on the "root" of the source code at www.freepbx.org, which I guess that means that it will be in 2.2?

Anyway, I downloaded the code changes and got it working from a command line. I added one tweak that you might want to consider: an FTPPORT parameter. I use oddball ports for FTP for security reasons. All I did was add FTPPORT to amportal.conf and modify the FTP command in ampbackup.pl like this:

# If $ftpport is left blank, it should just use the default port (21).
system ("ftp -n $ftpserver $ftpport < $ftpfile > /dev/null 2>&1");

Putting the port after the host on the ftp command is undocumented in the man page, so you might prefer to use the "open host [port]" command from inside the $ftpfile.

NOW, on to the burning question: this works brilliantly when I invoke the backup from the command line (logged in as user asterisk). But when I invoke it from the Backup screen inside FreePBX, whether as a Run Now job or a scheduled job, the ftp transfer doesn't happen. It doesn't even create the file in the /tmp directory.

Any idea what the problem might be? Is there a way to view the console output from the FreePBX so I can add some print statements to the Perl script and see what's going on?

Thanks for a great feature and for any help you can offer!

Mark

Sooo... this currently is the only way to have a complete backup as possible and quickly recover from a complete trixbox crash?

Does it also backup e.g. the TFTP directory?

the idea should be : to recover from a complete failure
install the current trixbox image on a (new) server, update trixbox
then restore the backup, then ready to go?

I guess not backed up is :
- sendmail config (yet, used by trixbox)
- tftp directory
- logs?

The reference to a partimage approach may have been confusing. That approach, and some alternatives, are discussed in another thread.

Mark

Hi: I am a complete dummy for this. I would like to Bakup/restore the entire Trixbox and all of the componets. I want To use an off site hard drive, which I use for (ghosting ) my entire hard drive in case of pure CRASH. Can someone spell this proceedure out ?
Maybe allow cut & paste with a little help. I am lost ,

Thanks you
RJLennon (trixbox learning )

RJLennon
I use Mondo. This allows you to make a full image of your drive and copy it onto cd's (2 cd-r's for TB2) . I have found Mondo easy to install, took me about 20 minutes. The backup may take an hour, depending on the speed of your machine. The images are copied to your hard drive and you can then copy them to a machine that has a CD burner. The cd's are bootable and will let you clone your system or do a bare metal recovery.
I have documented the process that I followed in a how-to here http://cat24.net/Mondoarchive.html

John

i installed mondo , well rather the Thomas Kings trix script , it is really easy to install , i set it to backup to CDR images and send to my FTP server . i burnt the CDRs (5) and cloned my production box on different hardware , mondo rescue has so many features for resizing disks and repartioning , absolutly fantastic ..this whole disk backup script is an absolute MUST have . it you need to restore your trixbox from a hacker or equipment failure

Hi,

If I am in the backup directory what is the command that will copy the desired backup to the desttop of my PC?

Thanks,

Raymond

We had a CRASHED trixbox the other day, I felt a pinch, but then thanks to BackUp.
Whew, thanks to good ol' backup!

Here's what we normally do on a daily basis.
On our clients installations (only 6 of them), trixbox run a automated freePBX DAILY backup, believe me, yes DAILY backup at midnight. The file ranges from 30mb to 38mb. The backups goes to its own local HDD, and our maintenance guy then manually connects to each Trixboxes (remotely - remotely actually from the Philippines where it is daytime) and then manually picks up the backup file to copy to individual Mounted USB drives (2GB to 8GB sizes). Then manually again, copies each individual backup files into our office storage, where they are kept for more than 6 months now.

On a monthly basis, we do a mondo ala takingly (Thomas King's) mondo scripts. It works great!

So when that crashed trixbox happened the other day! Boy that saved our day! Well it still took about 45 minutes to restore. But it save us faces and save us frustrations, and client is happy, because they DID the CRASH! Somebody PULLED the RAID drive and mess around with it and crashed the system... aha!

BTW, the backup and restore feature of freePBX will ONLY WORK with the SAME versions. If you have trixbox 2.2, then restore it to 2.2 and NOT to 2.4 or 2.5. It may get funny results.

Just wanted to share our 'fun' experience.

This new ftp option for backup works GREAT!

I just have 2 suggestions.

1. Via the gui, could you make ftp an option there? This would be useful when you want to grab a snapshot backup but don't require it to be ftp'd up.

2. An option to retain x days, of backups on ftp, or retain 5 days local and erase the copy on the ftp server?

Short of that, this makes life much easier!

Trying to use a backup taken with the trixbox backup utility to restore may server
I've reloaded the server copied the tarball to /var/lib/trixbox/backups/daily
Then gone into the web gui selected Tools>backup
Clicked restore
NOTHING HAPPENS
System is setup Exactly as the one that crashed

I have done above steps for backing up my data. Reload Trixbox, and now in freepbx, there is no backup/restore link anymore. I have edited amportal.conf, to enable FTPBackup already

Is there any idea to restore data now?
Thank you.