erpnext_admin_guide

3.4 Backing Up ERPNext

Backing up ERPNext is pretty simple. There are two kinds of backups from the admin guide’s perspective. A simple backup and a full backup. Let me explain.

3.4.1 Simple Backup

A simple backup just backs up the database and files into tar files. To accomplish this, simply run bench backup like this:

sudo su - erpnext
cd [bench name]
bench backup --with files

bench backup will create a tar.gz file of the database and tar files of the public and private files in the sites/[site name]/private/backups/ directory on the server. For example:

[yyyymmdd]_[hhmmss]-[site name]-database.sql.gz
[yyyymmdd]_[hhmmss]-[site name]-files.tar
[yyyymmdd]_[hhmmss]-[site name]-private-files.tar

3.4.2 Full Backup

There is another level of backup that is not really discussed in the Discussion Forums and is what the admin guide calls a full backup. The simple backup does not do anything with the code. There is no mechanism to revert to an older code base once bench update has been run. So when Upgrading, make sure to take a full backup like this:

sudo su - erpnext
# you should be in the root of the erpnext user home directory
# take a full backup of the whole system
tar -acvf erpnext-prd-backup-[yyyy-mm-dd].tar.bz2 [bench name]/*

This will create a tar.bz2 file in the /home/erpnext/ directory. You can then follow the steps in 3.3.3 Reverting to an Older Version to get back to a known good state.