Backing up your application¶

Database backups¶

Daily backups from the last three days are always available to you. You can make more backups at any time, for example, for critical stages of development. You should also periodically check to be sure backups complete as expected and test if you can restore websites from a backup copy.

• Automated backups: Cloud Platform makes daily backups of all databases in all environments and keeps them for three days. These backups are listed as Daily in the Cloud Platform interface Databases page. These daily backups are required and can’t be disabled.
• On-demand backups: You can make on-demand backups of any database at any time in the Cloud Platform interface, either on the Applications > Environments page, the Applications > [Environment] > Overview page, or on the Databases page. These backups are listed as User backups in the Cloud Platform interface Databases page. Cloud Platform keeps your on-demand backups until you delete them. Your backup copies count against the storage space of your account.

Cloud Platform takes internal disaster recovery snapshots of all data every hour and retains them on a diminishing schedule for three months:

• The most recent three backups are one, two, and three hours old.
• One backup per day, taken as soon after midnight as possible, Acquia keeps for seven days.
• One backup per week, taken as soon after midnight Sunday as possible, Acquia keeps for four weeks.
• One backup per month, taken as soon after the first of the month as possible, Acquia keeps for three months.

In the event of a total data center loss or the loss of several disk systems, Cloud Platform would use these backups to restore your applications to another location. Cloud Platform does not provide subscriber access to these backups and will not use these snapshots to restore applications due to data loss or deletion by subscribers.

Code backups¶

Your code is maintained in a version control repository managed by Acquia. Each time you commit code, a new tag is created in the version control system. You can revert to an earlier tag at any time in any of your environments.

File backups¶

Your uploaded files are kept separate from your Drupal codebase and database, using a symbolic link to your application’s /files directory. The Git version control system can manage text files full of code, but is less well suited for managing large collections of user-uploaded objects, such as images, videos, or file attachments.

Cloud Platform makes internal disaster recovery snapshots of your files, but these are not available for subscribers for normal backup purposes. If you want to back up your uploaded files, you can either do so manually from the command line or create a cron task to make backups on a regular schedule.

For more information, see Working with files and Backing up your Drupal file system.

Full application backups¶

You can back up your whole application on an environment from the command line, using Drush. The drush archive-dump command creates a complete archive file of your application.

For example, to back up the Prod environment of an application named example1:

drush @example1.prod archive-dump

By default, the backup file is saved to the drush-backups folder. Use the --destination option to specify the full path and file name in which the archive should be stored.

For more information, see About Drush on Cloud Platform and the Drush Commands reference.

Related topics¶

• Working with databases
• Working with files
• Backing up your Drupal file system