Introduction

On Frappe Cloud, we take automated backups for site's with $25 plan and further. Frappe Cloud has automated mechanism in the backend which makes sure to take backup for your site every day.

Frappe Cloud offers two types of backups: on-site (physical) and offsite (logical) backups. Let's have a look at what each of that means.

1. Onsite: These backups stay on the server machine and never leave the server. They are stored in compressed format. Onsite backups are usually faster.
2. Offsite: In offsite, we take a backup of the site, compress it with gzip and then the compressed file is uploaded to an AWS S3 Bucket in ap-south-1 (Mumbai) region by default. Read more about offsite backups.

Onsite Backup Frequency

Frappe Cloud takes automated backups of your sites every 24 hours. There is no setting to increase this setting as of now.

The setting inside System Settings is for how many onsite backup files to keep within the sites directory, provided multiple backups have been taken. This will NOT change the number of automated backups taken by Frappe Cloud.

configuring number of onsite backups

As of now, there is no limit on how many onsite backups you can take in a day. You can mention any number which make sense and also take on-demand backups.

Offsite Backups

Offsite backups are available for sites on USD 25 and above plans.

Only the backup marked as "offsite" can be downloaded directly from Frappe Cloud dashboard

The onsite backups can only be downloaded from within the site

Automated backups are stored offsite, which means the files are stored on a different server than the site. This ensures that you can access your backups even in the unfortunate event of server downtime.

In the process of taking an offsite backup, we take the backup, compress it and it is kept on your server machine until the upload to S3 Server is completed. Please make a note that, this increases your site's storage consumption metric by a few GB temporarily. Once the upload to the S3 server is completed the compressed files are automatically deleted from local.

Offsite backups are marked as such in the Backups tab.

Offsite backup reprensetation in the list of backups

Offsite Backup Rotation

For each site, a certain number of offsite backups are kept at all times. The frequency of backups is as shown below:

• 7 daily
• 4 weekly
• 12 monthly
• 10 yearly

This is done to store backups efficiently. For example, if the current day is Jan 13, then the backups available will be like so:

Backup rotation policy representation a Calendar

(Monthly and yearly backups before December 2020 not shown in picture)

• Weekly backups are taken every Sunday
• Monthly backups taken every 1st day of the month
• Yearly backups taken every 1st day of the year

Actions

Downloading backups

From the Frappe Cloud site dashboard, go to the Backups tab. Here you will see the list of backups that were taken of your site. Every backup consists of a database backup, public files backup, private files backup and a backup of your site's config.

Trigger on-demand backup

You can also trigger a manual backup operation for your site anytime from the Backups tab by clicking on the Schedule Backup button.

The job will be queued and it will take a few minutes to complete.

FAQ

Why is my backup size so much smaller than database usage I see in dashboard?

This is because we store backups in compressed form as it is static and no operations are being done on it. We use standard unix tool called gzip for compressing the backups. The difference is in size is thanks to the same.

You can download the backup and decompress it with gzip to compare the size for yourself. It should be almost same as the size you see in your dashboard.

Forbidden: You need System Manager Role to access backup

This happens when you try to download onsite backup, and you are not logged in to your site with a user of role System Manager or higher. You can simply login as adminstrator from your FC dashboard and then try to download again.

What are the scheduled times for these backups?

There's no scheduled time. We do backups for all sites on a round-robin basis. But if they want a scheduled time for backup to run, we can set it.

How can I access and download the backed-up data?

You can access your backups from the Frappe Cloud dashboard>Backups tab.

What is the storage capacity for backups?

We don't charge for these. They're uploaded to AWS s3 storage. So the limit is as high as they allow, which is 5 TB

What is the policy for archiving or deleting old backups?

You can refer to our Frappe Cloud Policy page here

How is backup data secured?

HTTPS is used for all communications. Encryption is opt-in. You can add a backup encryption key in the site config for this. Here is how you can enable backup encryption.

Where to find backup of particular date? The backup for the date I want is missing

We only keep backups as per our backup policy. You can take a look at our rotation policy above to get an idea of why certain dates' backups are available. Offsite backups are only available for $25 plan and above. No, you cannot request for a specific date's backup as we don't have them.

Change the backup time of a site

1. From the site dashboard, under the Backups tab, select the gear button next to Take Backup.
   
2. Turn on Backup site at custom time.
   
3. Select the hour in Backup time. The hours are in the time zone of your browser.
   
4. Select Save.

After you save

• The backup starts within the hour that you selected, not exactly at the start of it.
• To go back to backups every 6 hours, turn off the switch and save again.
• You can still select Take Backup at any time for an extra backup.

If our team set up more than one backup time for your site, the dialog shows those times and no Save button. Write to support to change them.

Backup fails because of a folder in private/backups

The backup of your site fails. The traceback of the failed job ends with this error:

IsADirectoryError: [Errno 21] Is a directory: './<your-site>/private/backups/<folder-name>'

The failed job in the dashboard also shows the banner "Backup failed because of a folder in the backups folder".

Why does it happen?

Each site keeps its backup files in the folder sites/<your-site>/private/backups. Before each backup, Frappe deletes the old files in this folder. Frappe can delete files only. If private/backups contains a folder, Frappe cannot delete it, and the backup stops.

Usually a custom app, a server script, or a manual step makes this folder. For example, an app that saves its export files next to the backups can make it.

The backup continues to fail until you remove all folders from private/backups.

Remove the folders on the private bench group

You can connect to a private bench over SSH and remove the folders yourself.

1. Connect to the bench over SSH. For the steps, refer to SSH Access.
2. Go to the backups folder of the site:

cd sites/<your-site>/private/backups

3. List the folders in the backups folder:

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d

4. If you need the files in a folder, move the folder out of private/backups:

mv <folder-name> ../<folder-name>

5. If you do not need the files in a folder, delete the folder:

rm -r <folder-name>

Warning: Make sure that you do not need the files before you run this command. rm -r deletes the folder and all the files in it permanently.

6. Do steps 4 and 5 again for each folder that step 3 shows.
7. In the dashboard, open your site, go to the Backups tab, and click Take Backup.

Remove the folder on shared bench group

You cannot connect to a shared bench over SSH. Raise a support ticket that gives the name of the site and the path from the error. The support team removes the folder.

After the support team removes the folder, take the backup again. In the dashboard, open your site, go to the Backups tab, and click Take Backup.

Prevent the error

Find the app or the script that makes the folder. Change it to write its files to a different location, and never to private/backups.

In Python code, use the private files folder of the site:

path = frappe.get_site_path("private", "files", "<your-folder>")

Do not use frappe.utils.backups.get_backup_path() or a path that ends in private/backups for your own files.