It’s important to make backups of your game database and files. There are many ways to do this, a few of which are discussed here.
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Here are the things that you need to back up in order to protect your game from disaster:
/var/lib/redis/dump.rdb
./home/ares/aresmush/game
. This includes your config, styles and web portal file uploads.The file locations above assume you used the automated install. If you did a custom installation, hopefully you know where you put things.
Ares has several backup options available to you, each with their own pros and cons.
By default, Ares is configured to perform nightly backups, stored in the /home/ares/aresmush/backups
directory. It will keep the last few days of backups.
This offers you some protection against someone messing up your database or accidentally deleting some files, but it doesn’t help you if your server suffers a catastrophic failure or if you want a backup from a month ago.
For added backup security, you can FTP these files to your PC’s hard drive; you just need to remember to do so.
If you are using a DigitalOcean droplet, you can use their Automatic Backup feature to create a weekly backup of your entire server. This includes the database, the code, the server config - everything.
This is the most robust form of backup strategy, but it costs a little extra. As of 2/18, automated weekly backups of the standard Ares droplet size cost $1/month.
AresMUSH can automatically perform daily backups to Amazon’s S3 storage service for a safe, off-site storage solution.
For the automated backup strategies (local or AWS), there are a few things you’ll want to configure.
backup.yml
.Set the backup type to ‘aws’ for AWS backups and ‘local’ for local backups.
You can configure the number of backups the game keeps. By default this is 5. The game will only keep this many backup files.
You can configure when backups are done. By default it’s early morning, after peak MU* times. See the Cron Job Tutorial for help if you want to change this.
If you used the standard install scripts, the game should already be configured with the proper database file location. But if you performed a custom installation, you’ll need to tell the game where the database file is.
database.yml
.In addition to the basic backup settings above, there are a few extra steps you’ll need to do to configure backups through Amazon S3.
To set up automatic backups, you’ll need:
You’ll need to follow the Amazon tutorials, particularly Getting Started With S3 and Managing Access to S3.
Once you have an S3 account, you’ll need to configure the game to use it.
backup.yml
to aws
as described in the previous section.There are many moving parts in the AWS backup process. Once you have it all set up, we recommend that you test it once using the manual db/backup
command. Make sure that the database file ends up in your S3 bucket successfully before relying on the automatic daily backups.
In the event you need to restore a backup, see Restoring Backups.