Nice news from Kevin Roast (@kevinroast) that on twitter talks about the release of the new Alfresco 4.2.d Community Edition.
Alfresco 4.2.d – release coming next week! Features and improvements with exciting screenshots: http://bit.ly/kevsblog09 #alfresco #cms #ecm
We wait for it! 🙂
Nice news from Toni De La Fuente (@ToniBlyx) that on twitter talks about an interesting new tool on alfresco.
First alpha version of the #Alfresco Backup and Recovery Tool (BART) is done, now writing documentation, will be released ASAP!!
We wait for it! 🙂
[Update of 07 August 2013] First released announced here.
In the Alfresco wiki is described the backup and restore strategy but is not so clear how to do it in detail. In this post is shared a practical way to perform a restore of a backuped Alfresco 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 restore strategy supposes that the backup is done as a “cold backup” described in this ‘Alfresco backup script‘ post.
Let’s start…
First of all proceed to stop alfresco.
service alfresco stop
Supposing the DBMS runs using the ‘postgres’ user, proceed as first task to restore the PostgreSQL database.
su - postgres psql DROP DATABASE alfresco; CREATE DATABASE alfresco WITH OWNER alfresco;
Digit CTRL+d to exit from the shell.
psql -U alfresco -d alfresco ALTER USER alfresco WITH PASSWORD 'alfresco';
Digit CTRL+d to exit from the shell. Supposing the DBMS backup is stored in the ‘alfresco_postgres.tar’ file conforming to the backup strategy described here, let’s go ahead with the restoring of the database.
pg_restore -d alfresco alfresco_postgres.tar exit
Now it’s time to restore the ‘alf_data’ folder with documents and indexes. Also in this case is supposed that the files are stored in a ‘alfresco_data.tgz’ file conforming to the backup strategy described here.
cd /opt/alfresco mv alf_data alf_data.old tar zxvf alfresco_data.tgz
That’s all!
Now it’s time to start again Alfresco and use it normally.
service alfresco start
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.