Backup

DeskNow includes a backup facility, that lets you do both manual and scheduled backups of the following:

1. configuration files
2. user files
3. mail folders
4. mail queues (incoming/outgoing mail waiting for delivery or processing)
5. embedded database (if you are using it)

The backup control panel is available in Administration/Backup

If you're using an external database, please see the other articles in this section with instructions on how to perform the backup and restore for external databases.

Restore

Data automatically backed up by DeskNow is stored in a directory configured by you (it is desknowdatabackup by default). If you're using another directory, make sure that no other files are in that directory, apart from DeskNow backups, as DeskNow will automatically remove older files (backup rotation).

Important: before restoring any data, make sure that DeksNow is not running

The backup consists of a series of tar.gz files (zip for older versions of DeskNow, depending on which items you decided to backup. The files are mail.tar.gz (mail queues), usermail.tar.gz (mail folders), cfg.tar.gz (cfg files), mckoidb.tar.gz (if you're using the embedded db), userfolders.tar.gz (user files).

To restore them, simply uncompress the tar.gz file (most unarchivers can open this format, including WinZip and 7-Zip) into a directory with the same name (ex 'cfg') under the desknowdata directory. Make sure to previously remove the directory if existing.

Mirroring backup for very large sites

When your server hosts a large amount of data (tens of Gb), you may find that taking a full backup takes a long time. In this case, it is possible, especially for the user mails and user files, to use a mirroring backup strategy instead. An mirroring backup keeps a 'mirror' copy of all these files on a remote drive, and periodically adds to the mirror the new files and removes files removed from the original folders. To perform a mirroring backup, you can use an utility such us rsync (a standard Linux/Unix command) or, for Windows, something like BackupMagic . Remember to turn off the full backup of these folders after you have setup a mirroring backup!