Trac Backup
Table of Contents
Since Trac uses a database backend, some extra care is required to safely create a backup of a project environment. Luckily, trac-admin has a command to make backups easier: hotcopy.
Note: Trac uses the hotcopy nomenclature to match that of Subversion, to make it easier to remember when managing both Trac and Subversion servers.
Creating a Backup
To create a backup of a live TracEnvironment, simply run:
$ trac-admin /path/to/projenv hotcopy /path/to/backupdir
trac-admin will lock the database while copying.
The resulting backup directory is safe to handle using standard file-based backup tools like tar or dump/restore.
Please, note, that hotcopy command does not overwrite target directory and when such exists, hotcopy ends with error: Command failed: [Errno 17] File exists: This is discussed in trac:ticket:3198.
Restoring a Backup
Backups are simply a copied snapshot of the entire project environment directory, including the SQLite database.
To restore an environment from a backup, simply stop the process running Trac (i.e. the Web server or tracd), restore the directory structure from the backup and restart the service.
Note: Automatic backup of environments that don't use SQLite as database backend is not supported at this time. As a workaround, we recommend that you stop the server, copy the environment directory, and make a backup of the database using whatever mechanism is provided by the database system.
See also: TracAdmin, TracEnvironment, TracGuide, TracMigrate?
