History: Tiki Manager and Syncthing for automated offsite backups

Use case: I have some Tiki instances on ClearOS and I want automatic backups of different Tiki instances to various local computers for safekeeping. These are high level instructions as to how to combine Tiki Manager and Syncthing to do so. For a hosting company and its customer, this is the optimal solution: This permits a customer to delegate the hosting / management of an application while obtain automatic backups of their application and data.

At a high level:

1. Tiki Manager (installed on the same server) will make incremental and automated backups of each site to a distinct folder
2. Syncthing will securely copy each folder to one or many devices.

Benefits / Features

• Automated (unattended): put Tiki Manager backups on a cron job
• Incremental while being somewhat efficient for disk spaceThis could be improved quite a bit. Volunteers welcome! : Tiki Manager has a retention cycle: keep last 7 days, last 4 weeks and once per month forever
• Remote backup to any number of devices: Syncthing is designed for peer-to-backups
• Managed via a web interface (Syncthing)
• Web interface can be protected by 2-factor authentication (in addition to password)
• Data is encrypted in transport by Syncthing
• Cross-platform: Syncthing supports GNU/Linux, Windows, OSX, Android, *BSD, Solaris
  • The Syncthing Lite Android app even lets you access files on-demand.
• Devices can be behind the firewall, and without a fixed IP address. Ex.: Syncthing on your laptop
• Throttling: Can set Incoming and Outgoing Rate Limit (KiB/s)
• Backup Tiki, the database and even files that are outside the web root: Tiki Manager checks the Tiki database to know which directories to fetch, if any.
• Designed to cope with a Ransomware attack (see recipe below)
• Flexible multi-site design: Each Tiki is backed up in own folder providing flexibility on what to send where.
• Easy to restore: backups are in a format that can be restored by Tiki Manager with the instance:restore command.
• Avoid disk full issues: Syncthing will halt before filling up 100% of your disk. (Tiki Manager still needs this added). TODO: Add alerting to both

Weaknesses:

• This recipe is not particularly efficient for bandwidth or disk-space. Ex.: there is no deduplication algorithm

ClearOS as web server

Install each Tiki as a distinct website using sub-domains: How to set up websites on ClearOS

Good:

• example.org
• example.com
• projecta.example.org
• projectb.example.org

Bad:

• example.org/projecta/
• example.org/projectb/

Setup Tiki Manager

Install Tiki Manager in /opt/tiki-manager/app as per https://doc.tiki.org/How-to-install-Tiki-Manager-on-ClearOS#Install_Tiki_Manager_Step_By_Step

Use Tiki Manager to make instances, or adopt them

• Use local with these instructions: How to install Tiki with TRIM

Configure Tiki Manager to backup your Tiki instances

https://doc.tiki.org/Manager#instance:backup

The Tiki Manager archive folders have the following pattern:

• /opt/tiki-manager/app/backup/archive/1-example.org/
• /opt/tiki-manager/app/backup/archive/2-example.com/
• etc.

Check that your backup is OK, and move on to the next step

Set up automatic backups

Tiki Manager will make the backups and also has a retention cycle (keep last 7 days, last 4 weeks and once per month forever)