In my previous post I configured Ubuntu Server with a set of scripts and cron jobs to backup (and restore) the Feng Office installation folder and the MySQL database to a Windows share.
The Feng Office wiki mentions an alternative backup method – in the form of a plugin that can be installed and configured from the Administration panel. The current version of the backup is v1.0 and it can be downloaded from here.
The plugin does include a basic readme.txt file but it does not clearly detail the steps that are needed to install the plugin.
First you will need to have wget and unzip installed on your server:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install wget unzip
You can either download the plugin (if the version has changed since this post was written) and upload it to your Feng Office server or use wget to download the file as follows:
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/opengoo/files/plugins/backup/ backup_1.0.zip
Extract the plugin to your Feng Office installation folder – for me this is /var/www/feng_community:
sudo unzip backup_1.0.zip -d /var/www/feng_community/
Now open a browser and log in to Feng Office as the Administrative user.
Copy and paste the following URL to install the backup plugin (replace <server-ip> with the IP address of your Feng Office server):
http://<server-ip>/feng_community/index.php?c=backup&a=install
You should now see that the plugin is successfully installed:
Click the back to opengoo link to return to Feng Office and then click the Administration link:
In the Administration Panel click the Backup icon:
Click the Launch backup process link:
Once the backup is complete you can download it to your local machine and then delete the backup from the server:
If you check the Cron Events section of the Administration Panel you will see that the backup plugin can be scheduled and enabled quite simply.
The only problem that I see is that the backups are saved locally on the Feng Office server – this still requires the Admin user to download the backups to store them somewhere else.
Sadly as far as I can tell restoring the backup is a manual process. While it doesn’t look too taxing it would involve copying the backup to the Feng Office installation folder and then manually restoring the MySQL database backup.
While this backup process seemed to work quite nicely (and it is nice to be able to do from within the Feng Office interface) I plan to use the scripts and cron jobs that I already have set up to back up Feng Office.
Michael Lane's Technology Blog 