Backing Up an OpenACS Installation

Guess if I'm going to talk about doing a restore, I should mention doing a backup! These are the steps I follow before completing an upgrade or major modification:

1. Create a directory outside the web path, I created the directory /backup off of the root.
2. Copy the web directory to the backup directory. #>cp -Rf * /backup
3. Change to my dbadmin account change to the backup directory and perform a dump of the current database. #>pg_dump -f currentdb.dmp dbname

This completes my pre-upgrade sequence. I then copy the latest tarball over my current web root, restart the server and go to the package manager to perform upgrades to any packages that have changed. If everything has worked out well, I then copy my master templates and index.adp into the /www root folder. Check all the packages and fix the few small glitches that appear. Soon, I will be adding CVS to my process, this should keep me from having to go to each module and editing individual files AFTER the upgrade. All the edits can be performed on the upgrade versions before the overwrite of the /web root folder.