Backup policy of NextCloud

Technology Infrastructure and Services
1

Hello!!!

What is the backup policy of our share.mayfirst.org (NexCloud) Also, have we had any major incident (like losing data because of hard drive failures, opetational errors, etc in the last) in the past?

The question comes from my friend from Patio (https://patio.coop) :smile:

2

Hi yasuaki,

We are in the process of moving to a new wiki support system - so I took this opportunity to add a page with this answer to it - you can find it here: How is my data protected at May FIrst? | May First Documentation Wiki

Also, with Nextcloud, all deleted files are kept you in own “Trash” - at least until you hit your quota. You can purge your trash if you prefer.

As for major incidents - yes, we had one major incident in about 2011. One server was accidentally jostled in the colocation center causing it to lose power. When it was re-booted, we discovered that due to a poorly kept shared secrets store, we were missing the disk encryption password so we were unable to decrypt the data on the server. As a result, we had to restore the entire server from our backup. The server hosted several virtual servers, and one of those virtual servers did not have a proper backup of it’s database, causing members using that database to lose their data.

To ensure this doesn’t happen again we took several steps:

  • We switched to a better system for storing shared passwords
  • We wrote a tool that audits all encrypted disks to ensure we have those passwords and we’ve employed a practice of using the tool before every reboot
  • We began using the Puppet server configuration tool that ensures all servers have uniform configurations (including backups)
  • We employed monitoring systems that warns us if any server has not been properly backed up
1 Like
3

Thank you @jamie for detailed and quick reply!! Let me pass this information to my colleagues!!

4

Hello,

We keep the last 10 days of backups of Nextcloud files.

1 Like
5

Jaime buenas noches, logre empezar a editar con wiki
En este tema en tareas comunes: How to access website files over ssh or sftp
quizas me falta mas cosas que agregar y edicion que corregir.
Dime si voy bien, utilice la liga en ingles pero lo puse en español???

6

unrelated to backups, but i love the look of the new documentation wiki!

2 Likes