Backups/scn

Miraheze has an internal and external backup procedure. Following the schedule below, certain critical parts of our infrastructure are automatically backed up to an external server (external meaning under our control but provided by a different server host and in a different country than all our current servers). These 'internal' backups include full database dumps, which include user account information and CheckUser information. These backups are only accessible by our Site Reliability Engineering team, and can be used in the event of a catastrophic site failure to quickly bring the entire site up to a recent state.

Backups of a wiki
In addition to these private backups, any wiki administrator can create an XML or image backup of their wiki by going to Special:DataDump on their wiki and selecting XML or image type. These backups can then be stored securely wherever you like. XML backups do not include user account information or CheckUser information but contain wiki page text and logs that you can import to any MediaWiki site. Image dumps contain all file types uploaded to the wiki, but without descriptions or licensing type.

General backup Schedules
Miraheze runs the following backups for disaster recovery purposes:


 * Weekly: Private Git Repository for configuration management secrets and SSL keys
 * Weekly: mhglobal (CreateWiki, ManageWiki, global tables) and reports (TSPortal) databases
 * Fortnightly: All other databases in SQL format for all wikis and other services
 * Fortnightly: Phabricator images and database
 * Monthly: piwik (Matomo) database
 * 3-monthly: Full XML dumps of all wikis, including private wikis


 * Not currently ran: Static images for all wikis

Local backups
A fast and simple method to backup Miraheze wikis is Elsie Hupp's Python 3 fork of the WikiTeam dumpgenerator.py Python 2 script.

Note: This doesn't yet work for every Miraheze wiki, some debugging is still needed.

Example usage, this will produce an XML dump, a folder of images (and other files) and a JSON file: or on Windows:

The presence of a siteinfo.json file probably indicates a succesful XML dump.

Full instructions are at elsiehupp/wikiteam3.



Talìa puru
For more technical details on our automatic backup server, see Tech:Bacula.