If you wish to use an external backup service for your Deskpro server, we recommend checking the type of backup the service will perform.

Block-level Backups

These can be performed both via a client on the server, or externally through a hypervisor if you are running Deskpro on a VM.

External block-level backups will often use the hypervisor's 'snapshot' tools to perform a snapshot of the VM, then will back up that snapshot. These do not affect the working of the VM itself and do not require any special consideration.

However, block-level backups via a client running on the server may cause issues, as these will tend to temporarily 'lock' sections of the disk, while writing a transactional log of any changes during the backup process. This can cause significant performance issues with databases, which can have a knock-on effect of performance on how your Helpdesk runs.

Due to these issues, we recommend either running these services out of hours (if possible) to prevent any performance issues for users. Or if you are performing multiple block-level backups (such as an hourly backup), then you may want to exclude both /var/lib/mysql and /var/lib/elasticsearch from all but one of your daily backups, in order to prevent interference.

For both Internal and External block-level backups, these cannot easily restore databases from partial restores, so they would usually provide additional tools in order to safely backup databases. We recommend using these alongside the block-level backups to allow you to easily restore your databases in the event of any issues.

File-level Backups

File-level backups are similar to internal block-level backups, as they often run as a client on the server, but will scan the disk for files to back up, instead of backing up disk sectors.

This often requires the files to be locked during the backup process, which will simply cause your database to stop responding at this point. Due to this, we recommend excluding /var/lib/mysql and /var/lib/elasticsearch to prevent any data corruption within the database.

These backup services will often have similar database plugins which will allow you to safely backup and restore your databases, which we recommend using.

Transactional Backups

Transactional backups work by intercepting the requests from your processor to your disk, and store your backups as transaction logs, which can then be used to rebuild your disk based on the changes made from the original image.

Other than the initial image backup (which works like a block-level backup), transactional backups do not affect the disk or filesystem in any way, so do not require special consideration. However, it may provide a database plugin to allow for easier database restoration. If that is available, we recommend using it.