Our IT Dept has installed a system snapshot / imaging tool ( AppAssure/RapidRecovery) on our Jira, Bitbucket, and Confluence servers. Are there any pitfalls to be aware of when relying on such a tool for system backups? Is it still preferable to perform database backups as discussed here, or using the bitbucket command line backup utility?
When you restore a snapshot, make sure it is not reading email from mailboxes used by production Jira. Also make sure it is accessing a snapshot of the DB, not live prod DB on another server
Thank you for your thought provoking response. For what its worth, the DB server is running on the same VM as the Jira Server. We are using PostgreSQL.
Seems like I would need to shutdown or otherwise lock the application to accomplish either of those two things. Does a mechanism to do that even exist?
Alternatively, if ever restoring from these backups I suppose I could destroy the database and restore it from a backup if I were separately doing daily backups of the database just before the system is imaged.
You might also want to check the type of backup being taken - applications at times do not get restored on an incremental backup but would require a full backup.
I was told by the IT Dept. that the backups would be differential. I am not terribly familiar with this particular tool, but I can't conceive how you would do anything other than a full backup of system memory (if anything), regardless of whether you do a differential or incremental backup of the disc.
I've seen it work with the DB on the same machine, though that is only recommended for smaller Jira instances. You'd need to check that the restored snapshot can still access its local DB and no other DB though.
Stopping email getting read could be done by disabling all mail habndlers before taking a snapshot, but that's not convenient. Changin the JVM parameters used at Jira startup would be better. So you don't want to have Jira restart automatically
Taking full backups everyday would not be a good thing to do as it consumes a lot of space- rather once a week. One full backup + differential is good for restoring.
Agreed. I was speaking specifically about what is in system memory. I am not sure how you could possibly hope to deferentially back that up. A differential backup could very likely be close to a full backup from day to day.
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