Scheduling backups & snapshot pruning

Regular backups should be scheduled using cron(8) or similar command scheduling service on the backup host. The backup frequency will dictate the worst case recovery point objective (RPO) in your backup plan. We recommend hourly backups as a starting point.

It's important to consider the duration of each backup operation on the GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) appliance. Backups of large datasets or over slow network links can take more than an hour. Additionally, maintenance queues are paused during a portion of a backup runs. We recommend scheduling backups to allow sufficient time for jobs waiting in maintenance queues to process between backup runs

Only one backup may be in progress at a time.

Example scheduling of backups

The following examples assume the Backup Utilities are installed under /opt/backup-utils. The crontab entry should be made under the same user that manual backup/recovery commands will be issued under and must have write access to the configured GHE_DATA_DIR directory.

Note that the GHE_NUM_SNAPSHOTS option in backup.config should be tuned based on the frequency of backups. The ten most recent snapshots are retained by default. The number should be adjusted based on backup frequency and available storage.

To schedule hourly backup snapshots with verbose informational output written to a log file and errors generating an email:

MAILTO=admin@example.com

0 * * * * /opt/backup-utils/bin/ghe-backup -v 1>>/opt/backup-utils/backup.log 2>&1

To schedule nightly backup snapshots instead, use:

MAILTO=admin@example.com

0 0 * * * /opt/backup-utils/bin/ghe-backup -v 1>>/opt/backup-utils/backup.log 2>&1

Example snapshot pruning

By default all expired and incomplete snapshots are deleted at the end of the main backup process ghe-backup. If pruning these snapshots takes a long time you can choose to disable the pruning process from the backup run and schedule it separately. This can be achieved by enabling the GHE_PRUNING_SCHEDULED option in backup.config. Please note that this option is only avilable for backup-utils >= v3.10.0. If this option is enabled you will need to schedule the pruning script ghe-prune-snapshots using cron or a similar command scheduling service on the backup host.

To schedule daily snapshot pruning, use:

MAILTO=admin@example.com

0 3 * * * /opt/backup-utils/share/github-backup-utils/ghe-prune-snapshots 1>>/opt/backup-utils/prune-snapshots.log 2>&1

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