Making Stash backups easier
Until now, Atlassian’s recommended procedure for backing up a Stash server involved shutting down Stash and using your own scripts to backup the database and filesystem. That wasn’t ideal: system administrators had to spend time writing backup scripts and users were often given no information why the system is down.
Alongside Stash 2.7, we’ve released the Stash Backup Client. This makes backing up Stash much easier for system administrators and improves the experience for Stash users.
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Less work for Stash admins
The Stash Backup Client is a command-line tool that runs on your Stash server. It should take a system administrator only a few minutes to download and configure the client. In order to minimize downtime, the client performs filesystem and database backups in parallel. Also, the client runs from the command line, making it simple to use a scheduling tool like `cron` to take regular, automated backups.
The Stash Backup Client makes restoring from a backup easy, too. Restoring isn’t limited to disaster recovery. At Atlassian, we’re using the restore client to restore production backups onto our staging server.
More feedback for Stash users
The backup client works with the Stash server to give users feedback during a backup. For instance, users visiting the Stash server in their browser during a backup will see the following:
When the backup is complete, the browser will automatically reload the working Stash system.
Users trying to push changes aren’t left out either. The backup client will wait for any in-progress git operations to complete before starting. After that, users will see the following:
As a result, backing up a Stash server should be much less jarring for end users.
Getting the Stash Backup Client
You can download the Stash Backup Client on Atlassian Marketplace. It’s free and compatible with Stash 2.7.0 and above. For more information on how to configure the backup client, take a look at the Stash online documentation.
Give it a try and let us know if you have any suggestions for improvement. We hope it makes your backups easier!