Regularly back up your Flow Enterprise Server data and settings, especially before upgrading or modifying your installation. Use this article to understand what is most important to back up during this process.
Application data backups
The majority of the settings and data for Flow are stored in the database you configured as part of the installation. To back up this data, follow your company's backup policies using your chosen backup platform.
Some recommendations:
- Perform a full backup of the database at least once a month.
- Perform incremental backups daily.
- Be sure that the backup technology you use will back up and restore users, permissions, views, triggers, tables, and schemas.
- The backups should be encrypted and protected using your company's security policies and procedures.
Settings data backups
Flow settings data from the KOTS admin console is stored in Replicated, located at port 8800 of your base Flow URL. This data can only be changed from the KOTS admin console, and does not change as you make settings changes in Flow itself. There are two ways to back up this data.
The first option is to use the latest version of flow-enterprise-tools
to export the settings. To do this, use the flow-tools export
command. This option backs up your encryption keys as well, which is vital if you ever need to reinstall or recover your Flow instance.
Otherwise, manually document all the settings you configure, especially:
- TLS/SSL Certificates
- The e-mail server settings
- BitBucket Cloud credentials
- GitHub Cloud credentials
- GitLab Cloud credentials
- Database hostname, name, and credentials.
Store certificates and credentials in a secure storage method preferred by your company.