Is it necessary to disable the Confluence service during a backup?

[marcus_reinhart]

Hi,
is it necessary to stop the Confluence service during a backup?
We have installed Confluence on a Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, with PostgreSQL.
Currently, we have configured our daily backup to disable Confluence during this process.
Unfortunately, Confluence is then unreachable for half an hour.
As information is stored in Confluence, which is important in case of problems in our IT infrastructure, accessibility of the system is very important.
Is it possible to make a backup on the fly without losing important information?
Best regards
Marcus

[Diego · Accepted solution]

Hello there Marcus!

So, it depends.

Doing a "cold backup" is a good idea to maintain backup consistency. You see, starting a backup with the instance running Confluence could write new information or alter existing info that may affect the rest of the back up that has been already done.

If you have an inconsistent backup, it may break something in Confluence if you need to restore it someday.

For the daily incremental backup, you could set it to run in the early morning. Something around 3AM. If your teams are not active during this time, that is.

The weekly full backup can be created in the weekends, since they usually take more time. Again, this is a good idea if your team is not active during weekends.

Currently, your approach of doing "cold backups" is the safest one.

If you happen to have Confluence Data Center you could set Connie for Read-Only mode and create the backup. In read-only no data is written, so no changes to Confluence data would be applied. You read more about it here:

Using read-only mode for site maintenance

Looking forward to your reply Marcus!