We recommend daily data backups are configured for all platforms, ideally in a separate environment to where Tines is hosted. This separate environment could be made more reliable by being hosted in a different region, separate infrastructure, etc.
These steps will be varied for different platforms, so it's best to consult your platform's guidelines for specific instructions. We have detailed instructions for our supported platforms below.
AWS
AWS RDS
For AWS RDS we recommend that you turn on backups following the instructions here. It is best to set the backup retention period to 7 days and to ensure the backup frequency is at least daily.
If you're using AWS Aroura, you can follow the steps here.
AWS Elasticache
The data that lives in Redis inside AWS Elasticache is very short lived. So nightly backups are not really that helpful. For high availability we recommend that you turn on Multi-AZ option on your AWS Elasticache Cluster. You can follow the instructions here.
Docker Compose
Step 1: Copy the data to a backup folder
The first step is to copy the data to a file, which will then be transferred later. The exact instructions will vary depending on how your environment is configured, but here are some examples.
Example 1: using pg_dump
If you have the PostgreSQL client utility pg_dump , you can generate a dump file following instructions here.
Example 2: copying the data directory
Make a backup directory if it doesn't exist, e.g., mkdir db-backup.
Copy the data to this new directory, e.g., cp -r /var/lib/docker/volumes/tines_db-data/_data/ ./db-backup/2025-01-01/. You may need to change the name of the Tines database directory if you've configured it with a different name.
Step 2: Transfer the file to a separate system
You can now transfer the backup folder to a separate environment. There is an example below of how you could do this.
Example: using scp
You can use secure copy to transfer to a remote server. E.g., scp ./db-backup/2025-01-01/ backup@remote-server:/backup/2025-01-01.
Step 3: Automating this backup
The first two steps were manual ones to create a backup. In order to automate this process on a recommended daily basis, this could be set up to run automatically. Again, this is dependent on what platform you're on, but one way to implement this would be cron jobs on linux using a bash script with the commands above.