Backing up with Laravel

Thanks to all the excellent resources on server management many developers are now setting up and administrating their own servers. If you are one of them you can't count on anybody else but yourself to backup the data of your clients.
We'll cover the backup issues presented when using modern hosting such as Linode and DigitalOcean. Then we'll review some enterprise grade solutions. Finally we'll dive deep into implementing a backup system using Laravel 5's filesystem abstraction.

Transcript

1. Backing up 

   with 

   Laravel
   

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2. About me
   Freek Van der Herten
   Partner & developer at SPATIE
   @freekmurze
   https://murze.be
   

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3. Since 2003
   Websites, applications and webshops
   Team
   4 developers, 1 manager
   Specialisation
   Laravel development
   

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4. Open source software
   

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5. Open source software
   We use a lot of it
   Nginx, Laravel, Ubuntu, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Redis,
   Beanstalkd, MySQL, Composer, Glide, Homestead, Flysystem,
   Fractal, Carbon, PHPUnit, NPM, React, jQuery, Java, SSH, Sequel
   Pro, BackupPC …
   Basically everything listed in composer.json and package.json
   

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6. ± 80 packages on Packagist
   + 600 000 downloads
   A lot of benefits: learning, forced to write
   documentation and tests, showing the quality of
   our work, easy updating of client projects
   https://spatie.be/opensource
   We create a lot of it
   Open source software
   

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7. Laravel Permission
   Laravel Analytics
   

   Laravel Responsecache
   Laravel Medialibrary
   Open source software
   

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8. Associate users with roles and permissions
   Laravel Permission
   $role = Role::create(['name' => 'writer']);
   $role->givePermissionTo('edit articles');
   $user->assignRole('writer');
   $user->can('edit articles'); //returns true
   

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9. Retrieve Google Analytics data
   Laravel Analytics
   Analytics::getMostVisitedPages();

   Analytics::getTopBrowsers();

   Analytics::getNumberOfActiveUsers();

   

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10. Speed up your application 

    by caching the entire response
    Laravel Responsecache
    RESPONSE CACHE
    REQUESTS
    APP
    1
    2
    

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11. Associate files with Eloquent Models
    Laravel Medialibrary
    $newsItem->addMedia($file)

    ->toCollection(‘images’);
    $newsItem->getMedia('images')->first()->getUrl();
    $newsItem->getMedia('images')->first()->getUrl('thumb');
    $newsItem->addMedia($bigFile)

    ->toCollectionOnDisk('downloads', 's3');
    

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12. Log the activities of your users
    Convert addresses to coordinates
    A middleware to check authorization
    Get notified when a queued job fails
    Generate pretty url's for paginated pages
    Check if all links in your app work
    Integrate Glide with Laravel
    Subscribe users to MailChimp newsletters
    A Fractal service provider for Laravel 5 and Lumen
    Associate users with roles and permissions
    Store and retrieve objects from Algolia or Elasticsearch
    Convert PHP 7 code to PHP 5
    Fetch the entire trust chain for an SSL certificate
    Create and validate signed URLs with a limited lifetime
    Plug-and-play node.js events integration to emit change events
    A Pjax Middleware for Laravel
    Make your Eloquent models translatable
    

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13. https://spatie.be/opensource/laravel
    

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14. There is no 

    one size fits all
    solution for backups
    

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15. Small sites
    Shared hosting
    Backups by hosting provider
    Did not do anything regarding backups ourselves
    Hosting
    Up until a few year ago
    

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16. Bigger applications
    Learned server management through resources like
    serversforhackers.com, Forge
    Digital Ocean
    Hosting
    How we are currently doing it
    

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17. Horror stories
    

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18. Horror Story #1
    Earlier today, our Cloud Operations team was alerted to some
    performance issues affecting the physical server that hosts your droplet.
    … The damage was serious enough that this droplet was lost and not able
    to be restored.
    One fine morning I got this mail from Digital Ocean
    Full story: https://murze.be/2016/02/today-digitalocean-lost-our-entire-server/
    

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19. Horror Story #2
    This message is a follow-up to our previous emails. Despite the very best
    efforts of our engineering and datacenter operations teams, unfortunately
    the host machine that your cloud server resides on was not able to be
    recovered. At this point, there is complete data loss on the server.
    Horror can occur everywhere. A mail from Rackspace:
    Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3982571
    

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20. Ok, I’ll just use

    the backup service 

    from my cloud provider
    

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21. Horror Story #3
    

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22. Horror Story #3
    

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23. Relying on DO backups 

    is not enough!
    Only weekly snapshots
    Potentially a lot of data could get lost
    All the backups in the same datacenter
    If Digital Ocean is down backups can’t be accessed
    

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24. Solutions
    

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25. https://ottomatik.io/
    BackupPC
    Bacula
    Solutions
    Do not put your eggs in one basket
    

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26. Backups as a service
    Not free
    Install Ottomatik Server Agent on every server
    Easy to use interface
    Bring your own storage
    Ottomatik.io
    

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27. Open source software
    Installed onto a control server
    SSH’s into servers to be backed up
    Uses hard links to save disk space
    Some system administration knowledge is required to setup up
    BackupPC SERVERS
    BackupPC
    SSH
    

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28. Laravel Backup
    

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29. Backup files and databases to one or more filesystems
    Cleanup old backups
    Sending notifications
    Easily installed into any Laravel application
    Laravel Backup
    

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31. Backup files & databases
    FILES
    DATABASE
    SERVER
    S3
    DROPBOX
    DB DUMP
    .ZIP
    .SQL
    

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32. Backups use a lot of storage
    Artisan task to clean up old backups
    Will never delete the youngest backup
    Fully configurable
    Grandfather-father-son rotation scheme
    Cleanup old backups
    

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33. Grandfather-father-son
    rotation scheme
    FEW TIMES
    A DAY
    DAILY (16)
    WEEKLY (8)
    MONTHLY (4)
    YEARLY(2)
    

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34. Detects when no backups were made in a certain amount of days
    Detects if there is too much storage used
    Fully configurable
    Monitor backups
    

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35. On (un)successful events (backup failed, youngest backup is too
    old, backup uses too much storage …)
    Mail, Slack, Pushover
    Fully configurable
    Easy to extend
    Sending notifications
    

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36. Demo
    

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37. Your Laravel app may break
    Server may be down
    Install the package in a Laravel app on a separate server
    Monitor the backups of all your apps from there
    Monitoring best practices
    

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38. Monitoring best practices
    APPS
    BACKUPS
    MONITOR
    

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39. Install a Laravel app on the same server
    Point the configuration the the database/directories you which to
    backup
    Profit!
    Backing up a non Laravel app
    

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40. Backup to multiple filesystems
    Get notified when something goes wrong
    Monitor the health of your backups
    Easy installation
    Free
    Benefits
    

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41. Backup to multiple filesystems
    Get notified when something goes wrong
    Monitor the health of your backups
    Easy installation
    Free
    Benefits
    

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42. Drawbacks
    Can consume quite a bit a of disk space while backing up
    Application has credentials to access the backups
    No restore options
    

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43. https://docs.spatie.be/laravel-backup
    

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44. Questions?
    

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45. Thank you!
    https://joind.in/talk/cc523
    https://speakerdeck.com/freekmurze/backing-up-with-laravel
    https://murze.be
    https://spatie.be/opensource
    

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