SuiteCRM backups

📦 Install & Upgrade Help
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1

Hi all,

I’ve recently installed SuiteCRM on a self-hosted Linux host and it’s been running well so far.
However I’ve now reached a point where I need to confidently backup the VM + database.

Are there well established procedures on how to do this ? Is there a module for this type of thing and/or can this be done from the command line ?

I found the following link which seems useful:

The version of SuiteCRM is 7.14.0 with PHP 8.1.2

Cheers,

John

2

A full database dump and a backup of the entire SuiteCRM directory files is sufficient. Both of these are easy to do from the command-line.

3

Is there documentation on how to at least backup the database ? I found a link as per my original post.

Alternatively are there modules to achieve this ?

Thanks.

4

It is a single mysqldump command, the scripts in your link have that in there.

5

Create a directory to store backups

sudo mkdir /var/backup/db

Create a backup script and add the quoted text into the file.

sudo nano /home/root/dbbak.sh

DATE=date +"%d_%b_%Y_%H%M"
SQLFILE=/var/backup/db/db_backup_${DATE}.sql
DATABASE=<database_name>
USER=<db_user>
PASSWORD=<db_user_password>

sudo mysqldump -u ${USER} -p${PASSWORD} ${DATABASE}|gzip > ${SQLFILE}.gz

This is doing a few things;
Declaring DB Values, user & pass, using those declared values and then backing up to the /var/backup/db folder, there will be a date time stamp in the filename.
file format (i.e. db_backup_15_09_2023_10:43.sql)

If you want backups older than 7 days to automatically be removed add this at the bottom of the file

sudo find /var/backup/db/. -mtime +7 -exec rm {} ;

Save this file and continue.

To test this script use this command & then verify there’s a backup in /var/backup/db

sudo sh dbbak.sh

Now we want to check a few things as we’re being security concious at the same time.

The root user will run this as a cron job - put the file in root’s home directory and change the permissions so that only the root user can RWX - else anyone will be able to see DB creds.

Changes file owner to root

sudo chown root:root /home/root/dbbak.sh

Changes execution to allow this script to be run.

sudo chmod 700 dbbak.sh

Now we need to add this into our cron scheduler.

Log in as

root user or use sudo crontab -e

Add the following to the bottom of the file beware using sudo crontab -e puts you in a VIM window (please lookup VIM if you’ve never used it as a text editor)

0 1 * * * /home/root/dbbak.sh

This will then run at 1am server time every day.

If you can’t get on with the vim editor use

sudo nano /etc/crontab

Hope this helps.

6

Hi there,

I’ll be sure to try this out. Thanks for the detailed responce and tips.

Very much appreciated

7

I can confirm that your solution works like I charm. I didn’t follow the recipe precisely but the elements in the solution were spot on.

The only variation I applied was to use a configuration file to obfuscate the password from the command line, i.e.

sudo mysqldump --defaults-file ${CONFIG_FILE} ${DATABASE}|gzip > ${SQLFILE}.gz

… where the contents of ${CONFIG_FILE} would look something like

[mysqldump]
user=<db_user>
password=<db_user_password>

Thanks again …

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