Using the Site Factory Management Console, you can create backups of your
Site Factory-hosted websites. Each backup may include the
website’s complete docroot directory, database, public files, and private
files, all in a .tar.gz format suitable for exports.
You can create and download website backups using the Site Factory Management Console, and restore a website from a backup. You can also use the Site Factory REST API to create, list, and delete backups and to restore a website from a backup.
For procedures that you can use to exclude sensitive credentials, keys, or other private information from stored backups, see Storing sensitive information outside of your codebase.
Site Factory stores your backup files in the g/files directory. You can
access this location to delete unwanted files.
For example,
testacsf@web-3996:/mnt/files/testacsf01live/sites/g/files$ du -sh mxsain126/
17G mxsain126/
Note
The acsf-tools repository (also included with BLT) provides more backup scripts for Site Factory websites using Drupal 9 or later. For more information, see blog post.
To create and download backups, you must have a role with the necessary permissions.
Users with the platform admin role have permission to create and download backups of all websites.
Users with the site builder role have permission to create backups of their websites and to download backups they have created.
To create a backup of a website:
Sign in to the Site Factory interface.
Find the website you want to back up, and then open its actions menu.
Click Back up site.
In the Create site backup page, select the components you want to back up:
Click Back up.
After your backup completes, you will receive an email letting you know the backup is now available on the Site Backups page. Backups can take several minutes to complete for small websites, but larger websites can take much longer to complete.
The site backup process allows partial file transfers. If a partial backup occurs, an email with the missing files is sent to the user who initiated the backup.
In the Site Factory management console, the Complete column indicates whether the backup was full or partial. A notification is displayed in the Complete column next to the listed backup when a backup is incomplete.
In the REST API, a partial backup is displayed as a “complete” field in the return body.
You can view and download your website backups on the Site Backups page:
Sign in to the Site Factory interface.
In the administrative menu at the top of the page, click Sites.
At the bottom of the left-hand column, click All my site backups.
The backups are created with the site name, plus a timestamp from when the backup was created. To sort the table by name, by date, or by stack (if you have more than one stack) click the column heading you want to sort by.
Note
Backups that are more than one year old are automatically deleted. However, records of these backups may still appear in the user interface. For more information, see the Site Factory Product and Services Guide.
To restore a backup, identify the desired backup and in the Actions column, click Restore in the backup’s row:
Note
When you create backups using the Site Factory REST API, you can
use the label request parameter to modify the backup name.
To download a website backup file to your local computer, find the backup that you want to download on the Site Backups page and click the corresponding Download link.
Important
Site Factory non-production environments don’t make automated daily backups. Site Factory subscribers must create on-demand backups if necessary for their development process.
For information about using a backup file to restore a website, see Restoring a site from a backup.
Information about the acsf-tools toolkit, and its GitHub repository
Backing up databases of multiple websites with the Site Factory API
Create a site backup API endpoint
Delete a site backup API endpoint
List site backups API endpoint
Restore a site backup API endpoint
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