Backing up Funnelback

Introduction

This guide provides advice on backing up a Funnelback installation.

Backup priorities

Backup priorities will usually be chosen depending on the importance of restoring services provided by Funnelback:

• Public UI: query processing functionality
• Admin UI: access to analytics reports
• Admin UI: ability to run updates and crawls
• Admin UI / file system: access to query and click logs

The query processing functionality is usually the one with the highest priority - restoring the search service of the organisation website or intranet is more important than providing access to analytics reports. Similarly, crawls can often be postponed without major impacts.

Scheduled backups using a backup agent

Caveats

• On Windows ensure that any backup software does not lock the Funnelback live and offline data folders while any updates are running otherwise this can cause running collection updates to fail.
• Ensure that push collections are snapshotted.

Full backup of Funnelback

Before you start

• Stop all Funnelback services and ensure there are no running updates. This will ensure that no files change while the backup is being taken.

Backup process

1. Compress the $SEARCH_HOME/funnelback folder, ensuring symlinks are preserved, once all the services and updates are halted.
2. Backup the OS scheduled tasks (scheduled tasks control panel under Windows, or the Linux crontab).

Restoration

Restoring such a backup is simple as the archive just needs to be unpacked in place after installing Funnelbackl. If the archive is unpacked on a different server than the original one, it must be running the same version of Funnelback, and the Funnelback services will need to be re-created using $SEARCH_HOME/bin/setup/start_funnelback_on_boot.pl.

Individual files can also be restored selectively from the backup.

If moving between OS versions, only collection configuration should be restored and each collection's configuration will need to be reviewed to ensure all the paths are correct. Any indexes will need to be rebuilt.

Collection-level backups

This strategy applies different backup intervals depending on the types of the files being backed up.

Each individual collection is made of files spread across a small set of folders within the Funnelback installation:

Push collections

Push collections need to be backed up differently as they maintain internal state: simply copying the files at a given time will not result in a consistent backup.

Backing up push collections must be implemented via the snapshot API endpoint. This API will creates a snapshot of the push collections on the Funnelback server which can be then copied to a separate location for backup.

See: Backing up push collections.