Creating an Automated Backup Policy

We offer automated database backups, but they only go back 3 days before being rotated and deleted from your storage area. You may want to automate the backup process yourself, and include parts of your site including files and code. This article is more a list of ingredients than a true recipe for creating automated backups that are stored either on our file system or on a third-party cloud-based file system.

• Scheduled tasks: This lets you run almost any type of script on a regular basis using your Acquia instances as the computing engine. You have at your disposal Python, PHP and Bash scripting.
• Cloud Hooks: Similar to scheduled tasks, you can run any type of script (including invoking the Acquia Cloud API, see below) to invoke a backup before or after certain tasks that you initiate.
• The Acquia Cloud API: This give you hooks into anything that can be done via the Cloud UI, including invoking a database backup, and instead automating it. We recommend creating a generic user on the platform so that the API keys are not tied to a specific individual (who may leave your organization).
  • Acquia CLI (Command Line Interface) provides quick access to the API. It's a strong addition to your toolkit which you can use to script the download of databases. For example, the api:environments:database-backup-download command will get you URLs of the automated backs that you can pull down via HTTPS.
• Storage space: This can be your Acquia Cloud instances' file system, though as it stands now, you are limited to what you have been allotted, and you may prefer a cloud-based solution, which will have its own API credentials.
• Storing secrets, such as the aforementioned Acquia Cloud API keys and possibly the credentials for a third-party cloud-based file system.

A Note About Code
Code is stored on a different system, in your Git repository, and if you have multiple developers working on your codebase. This would mean that there is very likely an archive of your entire codebase and its history on one or more of your developers' local computers.