A couple of weeks ago, I decided to spend a few hours on a Friday afternoon improving my backup process for my Blackfly managed hosting service . Two weeks later, I've published my ongoing work as an update to my backup-rsync project and have decided to share it with you. You might think I'm trying to compete for "least click-bait like title ever", but I'm going to claim this topic and project might be of interest to anyone who likes to think about refactoring , or who is implementing backups for container-based hosting (like mine ). Definition "Backup" is one of those overloaded words in both vernacular and computer-specific use, so I want to start with definitions. Since "a backup" is amongst the least interesting objects (unless it contains what you absolutely need in that moment), I think it's more interesting and useful to define backups functionally, i.e. A "backup process" is a process that 1. provides a degree of insuranc
Four years ago, I started a github project to share my Drupal + CiviCRM container hosting solutions/ideas. It’s called “ Simuliidae ”, because that’s the family name of the species we know as black flies. What’s Happened Like so many open source projects, it was ambitious. I claimed four goals. Four years later, here’s my evaluation of those goals: 1. A simple way for evaluators to launch their own local Drupal/CiviCRM installation. This was my priority and relatively successful, at least for a while. I’d say it was successful as a technology demonstration, but of limited value for a potential CiviCRM evaluator because of weak support for Docker on Windows and Mac projects. It was also a lot of work to keep it up to date, and I didn’t. 2. A standard for generating testing and development copies of production sites. This was not particularly successful as a goal. Although I used some of the ideas here with my hosting services, I never moved beyond an idea stage for trying to come up wit