Alfresco backup script

In the Alfresco wiki is described the backup and restore strategy but is not so clear how is defined a script and how to do it more exactly. To be more precise the backup strategy could be a “cold backup” or a “hot backup”. In this post is shared a practical way to perform a “cold backup” in the way I like: a list of commands and tasks to execute… simpler to understand, to do and to test.

In this example is supposed that Alfresco is installed in ‘/opt/alfresco’ folder and the DBMS used is PostgreSQL. The script is developed to have a 10 days backup history. If in your case is requested more or less than 10 days you can simply modify the ‘NUM_DUMP’ variable.

Let’s start…

cd /opt/alfresco
nano alfrescoBackup.sh

.

#
# Cold backup of Alfresco.
#

# Configuration.
ALF_HOME="/opt/alfresco"
NUM_DUMP=10
ALF_DATA_SUBDIR="alf_data"
DB_HOME="/opt/postgresql"
DB_TYPE="postgresql"

# Check
if [ -d "$1" ]; then

  TARGET_FOLDER="$1"
  CURRENT_FOLDER="$(pwd)"
  TIMESTAMP="$(date +%F_%H-%M)"
  CHECK=1

  # 1) Alfresco stop.
  service alfresco stop

  # 2) Backup of the database of Alfresco with vendor service.
  DB_DUMP=${TIMESTAMP}_alfresco_${DB_TYPE}.tar
  if [ "$DB_TYPE" = "postgresql" ]; then
    cd $TARGET_FOLDER
    $DB_HOME/bin/pg_dump -Ft -b alfresco > $TARGET_FOLDER/$DB_DUMP
    cd $CURRENT_FOLDER
    if [ ! -f "$TARGET_FOLDER/$DB_DUMP" ]; then
      CHECK=0
    fi
  else
    echo "Unknown database type '${DB_TYPE}'"
    CHECK=0
  fi

  # 3) Backup of the Alfresco's data folder.
  if [ "$CHECK" = 1 ]; then
    ALF_DUMP=${TIMESTAMP}_alfresco_data.tgz
    cd $ALF_HOME
    tar zcf $TARGET_FOLDER/$ALF_DUMP $ALF_DATA_SUBDIR
    cd $CURRENT_FOLDER
    if [ ! -f "$TARGET_FOLDER/$ALF_DUMP" ]; then
      CHECK=0
    fi
  fi

  # 4) Merge the two backups.
  if [ "$CHECK" = 1 ]; then
    BACKUP_FILE="${TIMESTAMP}_alfresco_dump.tgz"
    cd $TARGET_FOLDER
    tar zcf $BACKUP_FILE $ALF_DUMP $DB_DUMP
    if [ ! -f "$BACKUP_FILE" ]; then
      CHECK=0
    else
      rm $ALF_DUMP
      rm $DB_DUMP
    fi
    cd $CURRENT_FOLDER
  fi

  # 5) Alfresco start.
  service alfresco start

  # 6) Delete dump older than a certains number of days.
  if [ "$CHECK" = 1 ]; then
    find $TARGET_FOLDER/*.tgz -type f -mtime +${NUM_DUMP} -exec rm {} \;
  fi

else
  echo "usage: $0 [targetPath]"
fi

Exit with CTRL+X and confirm saving. Let’s go ahead defining permits and preparing the repository folder. Talking about the repository folder here is presented an example but in practical cases is suggested to mount an external file system used specifically for backup purpose.

chmod uga+x /opt/alfresco/alfrescoBackup.sh
mkdir /opt/alfresco/backup

Now everything is set and it’s time to activate the crontab to perform automatic backup, probably during the night time. Please, observe that the user used to run Alfresco is named ‘alfresco’ (do not run it as root) and the crontab is performed as ‘alfresco’ user with ‘-u alfresco’.

sudo crontab -u alfresco -e

.

00 01 * * * /opt/alfresco/alfrescoBackup.sh /opt/alfresco/backup

In this example the cold backup of Alfresco is performed at 01:00 am. To read more about crontab see here.

Francesco Corti