Backups in MODX Cloud
Backups are a critical safety measure for websites, giving you something to fall back on if something breaks. At MODX Cloud, we believe backups are so important that we baked them into MODX Cloud. This includes configurable nightly backups that you can restore or download without opening a support ticket directly from the MODX Cloud Dashboard.
Important Note: Backups can occasionally fail, for example, when a file changes on disk during a backup, causing the tar process to fail. Customers should test Backups to validate they’re working correctly.
What are Backups?
A Backup is a copy of all the files in your Cloud instance’s public web directory, plus a copy of its database. Backups also keep a copy of the web rules for reference, visible when you open the Backup edit window.
Where are Backups Stored?
Backups are stored securely outside the website platforms in separate, redundant locations using IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS). All your backups are stored encrypted.
Storage locations are based on the location of the Cloud's host Platform to ensure backups are kept in the same geographic region to comply with privacy, data transfer, data processing, and data dominion rules. For example, a Cloud hosted at our Frankfurt or Amsterdam platform will be backed up to a COS location in the EU zone.
Vault Storage Usage
Backups count toward the total amount of your account Vault storage that you are using.
Automatic, Nightly Backup Retention Schedule
Each Cloud is automatically backed up nightly. By default, we keep 7 days of backups for every Cloud, with a minimum of 1 backup for every Cloud. For dev sites or less critical sites it may make sense to retain fewer backups. For important websites with lots of changes, retaining more backups probably makes sense.
You can configure the backup retention schedule at the bottom of the Backups tab of the Cloud Edit page.
How Backup Timing and Retention Works
All sites in MODX Cloud will be backed up sometime after midnight local server time every day. Therefore, a backup will reflect the state of a site at the beginning of most days. An individual backup can be tagged as a daily, weekly, monthly, and/or yearly.
- Days: You can keep 1-60 daily backups. Daily backups can never be set lower than 1 for any site, dev or production.
- Weeks: You can keep 0-52 weeks of backups. If selected, backups made on Sundays (server time) will be tagged as a weekly backup.
- Months: You can keep 0-24 months of backups. If selected, backups made on the last day of the month will be tagged as a monthly backup.
- Yearlies: If selected, the backup made on the last day of the year will be tagged as an annual backup. Yearly backups only accumulate and are never automatically culled.
Backup Retention Overlap
Daily/Weekly/Monthly backups have overlapping schedules and are not added to the end of your backup schedule for the longer durations. If you have 14 days of backups and 3 weeks of weekly backups, your dailies and your first two weeks of weeklies will overlap.
For example, if you you want 2 weeks of daily backups and 2 weekly backups past the dailies and a month after the weeklies, set the days slider to 14, the weeks slider to 4 and the months slider to 2.
You can have as few as one daily backup and still have weekly/monthly/annual backups.
How Backup Culling Works
When there are more backups tagged daily/weekly/monthly than the retention schedule set in the sliders above, the oldest backup with the tag for the respective policies will have those tags removed. For example, if you have 3 weekly backups set in your retention schedule: if there are now 4 backups after the latest nightly backup happens with the weekly tag, the oldest one will have its weekly tag removed.
Backups without any tags are permanently deleted every night at the completion of the backup cycle.
Manual Backups
You can also create Backups anytime from a number of places in your Cloud Dashboard. Manual Backups are not automatically deleted.
Migration Backups
If you move a site from one server in MODX Cloud to another one using the Dashboard tool, it takes a Backup of the site being moved before initiating the migration. Migration backups are not currently automatically deleted.
Archive Clouds
Archive Clouds are like Backups in that they store a version of your site. However, they function as paused instances that can be restarted on demand. Archive Clouds maintain all the configuration settings, web rules, domain records, DNS, and Add-ons, ready for reprovisioning without going through all the configuration steps.