Creating backups is an essential part of website management.
It’s vital to have a backup plan in place to ensure that your website can be restored in case of data loss or corruption. In this guide, we’ll walk through exactly how to create backup schedules on RunCloud.
Creating Your First Backup
To create a backup, log in to your RunCloud dashboard and click on the “Backup” option from the side menu.
Then click on “Create your first backup”.
Customize Your Backup Settings
On the next screen, select your web application from the drop-down menu, and provide a name for the backup.
There are multiple storage options available on RunCloud. We recommend using RunCloud storage. It’s affordable, fast, and reliable.
However, you can also use third-party storage options such as AWS S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, or even a simple SFTP server. To use third-party storage options, you’ll need to create an account with the service that you want to use, and integrate it with RunCloud by providing your API keys.
Note: If you are using external storage for backup, the incremental backup option will not be available.
There is also an option to save the backup on the original server, but this is not a recommended method for production servers.
We strongly recommend having at least one off-site backup.
Next, specify your preferred backup frequency and backup retention period. You can adjust the slider depending on your needs – creating more backups and storing them for longer will increase your storage costs.
Automatic Folder Exclusions
Our backup system is designed to be efficient by automatically excluding certain folders that contain temporary files.
When you enable automatic exclusions, RunCloud is configured to ignore folders such as .git, node_modules, vendor, and storage/logs.
Most modern web applications use dependency managers like Composer (for PHP) or NPM (for Node.js). These tools automatically download all the necessary code libraries into specified folders.
Our backup logic assumes that, after restoring your site, a developer would run a command (like composer install) to reinstall all those dependencies. Excluding these folders makes the backup process faster and uses less storage.
However, if you are using an application that requires the /vendor directory to be present to function correctly, these default settings can lead to issues during a full backup restoration.
To prevent restoration issues, you must know whether your application needs any of these folders to be included in the backup.
- If you are running a standard WordPress site or have a developer who manages dependencies with Composer/NPM after a restore, you can safely leave this setting enabled.
- If your application requires folders like /vendor (e.g., EspoCRM), uncheck the “Automatically exclude…” box to disable this feature. After this, you can manually select the folders or files that should be excluded from backup.
Lastly, you can configure whether you want to receive a notification on failed or successful backups.
Save Backup Settings
Once you have configured all the settings, you can click on “Create” to save the backup schedule. After your schedule has been successfully created, RunCloud will automatically create your first backup.
You can check this by going to the backups tab in the side menu, and opening the backup from the list of available backups.
In the backup dashboard, you can see some basic details such as the name of the web application, server, storage option used, frequency of backup, etc. You can click on the “Options” button to edit or pause the backup schedule.
You can also find a list of all backups that have been run at the bottom of this page in your dashboard.
Local and External Backup Directory Naming
The directory structure for full backups has been improved. Previously, only the <instanceId> was used as the directory name. As of June 4th, 2024 – the structure includes more detailed information:
<instanceId>-<backupType>-web-<webAppName>-db-<dbName>.
