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Operations: backups, schedules, and restore drills

Backups, schedules, and restore drills

Section titled “Backups, schedules, and restore drills”

A deployment is data: the manifest, every journal, the seed assets. unidpp-ops (in unidpp-pilot-data) packages that contract as four commands and a routine around them. See also Backup and restore for the concepts.

The routine

Section titled “The routine”
Terminal window
./unidpp-ops backup              # snapshot now (tar.gz + JSON sidecar
                                 # with per-file sha256 + the log tree
                                 # head as the consistency point)
./unidpp-ops schedule --install  # nightly backup at 03:17, merged
                                 # into the crontab idempotently
./unidpp-ops prune --keep 14     # retention REPORT (report-only;
                                 # --apply deletes exactly what it listed)
./unidpp-ops drill               # the restore rehearsal

prune never deletes unless --apply names the act — deletion is an explicit operator decision, not a default.

The drill

Section titled “The drill”

A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a capability. The drill proves the capability on live state:

  1. backup — a fresh snapshot;
  2. restore into a drill tenant the drill itself owns (production state is never touched; an existing drill tenant is refused);
  3. parity — every archive member byte-identical after restore (the manifest is rewritten by design: journal paths and the tenant name rebased to the drill tenant — that rewrite is then validated with unidpp-config);
  4. report — backups/<label>.drill.json (checksums, byte parity, manifest validation, consistency point);
  5. cleanup — the drill tenant is removed (unless --keep).

Run the drill after every upgrade rehearsal and before any infrastructure change. If it ever fails: do not touch production restore until the failure is understood — a failed drill is the cheapest possible discovery of a broken backup.

Restoring for real

Section titled “Restoring for real”
Terminal window
./unidpp-ops restore <archive> <tenant>        # refuses an existing tenant
./unidpp-ops restore <archive> <tenant> --force  # renames it aside,
                                                 # never deletes

Every checksum is verified before a single file unpacks. Only the backup’s OWN tenant journals rewrite into the restored tenant; other tenants’ journals restore as archive material under their original paths.