Backup & Restore

System backup

The system can be configured to take nightly backups. All it is needed is to specify a writeable bucket (HORTA_BACKUP_BUCKET) that will hold the backups. You can also specify the base prefix for the backups using HORTA_BACKUP_FOLDER. If this is not specified the prefix will default to “/hortacloud/backups”.

Currently the backup contains the Cognito users and the Mongo database (user-generated metadata and tracing data). Each backup will be stored in a timestamp (with format “yyyyMMddHHmmss”) folder under the base backup prefix. The location of the backups will be s3://<backup_bucket>/<backup_folder_prefix>/<timestamp>/jacs for the database and s3://<backup_bucket>/<backup_folder_prefix>/<timestamp>/cognito for cognito users.

The backup is configured as a cron job that runs daily at 3 AM local time on the EC2 host on which the backend services run.

System restore

If system backups are available, the sample and tracing data can be restored by specifying a specified backup bucket (HORTA_RESTORE_BUCKET) and prefix (HORTA_RESTORE_FOLDER) which typically was created by the nightly backup job.