It is essential not to underestimate the importance of ensuring that all your Firefly data is carefully backed up daily, as with time this will grow to include a large pool of vital school information, not to mention many hours of work. You should ensure that a rigorous and comprehensive backup solution is in place from the start.

Arguably the most vital section of data is your Firefly SQL database as this contains the entire content, structure and permissions of your site. The following instructions will help you to schedule automatic full backups of your Firefly database.

We recommend you check backups regularly in case the process has not been running as expected. You should also verify that they are functional (perhaps by restoring a database backup to a testing server running Firefly, if you have one).

  1. Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.
  2. Expand the database server.
  3. Expand the Management folder.
  4. Right-click Maintenance Plans and select Maintenance Plan Wizard. This launches the wizard and you can now step through and create a plan customized to meet your maintenance requirements.
  5. Click 'Next' button, then name your Maintenance Plan and give description. Select the radio button that says "Single schedule for the entire plan or no schedule".
  6. Under Schedule, click on the 'Change' button. This brings up the Job Schedule Properties form. In the Frequency section, change Occurs to 'Daily', and then click 'OK.
  7. Click 'Next' button, then check the box next to "Back Up Database (Full)", then click 'Next'.
  8. Click 'Next' button again, then select one or more of your Databases to be backed up using the Database(s) drop down box. Make any additional settings and then click 'Next'.
  9. On the Select Report Options form, click the 'Next' button once again.
  10. Then click the 'Finish' button to complete the wizard.
  11. The Maintenance Plan Wizard will run and should complete successfully. Click the 'Close' button.
  12. You should now see the database backup maintenance plan you just created underneath the Maintenance Plans folder in SQL Server Management Studio.

In addition to backing up your Firefly database, you should ensure that the following directories on your Firefly server are backed up daily:

  • Your resources directory (you will find the location of this, in the Configuration tab of Firefly.NET Manager)
  • Your Firefly installation directory (typically located at “…Program Files (x86)/Firefly.NET”)

Comments

  1. Excellent advice! Some extra things worth considering perhaps:

    The Maintenance Plan corresponds a to SQL Server Agent job, which you can see in SQL Management Studio (SQL Server Agent, Jobs then look for a job with MaintenancePlan, Subplan in the name) . For peace of mind you can set up an email notification on the backup job to send an email when the job completes/fails/succeeds.

    You can modify the backup job adding a CmdExec step to copy the folders listed above to a backup location.

    Depending on how often the site content updates, you could also backup the transaction log every hour or two and you will get point-in-time recovery, although Firefly's page versioning may mean you don't need that so much.

    This assumes that you are handling backups in SQL Server. There are several good backup solutions which will do the above for you as well. If you are using these then in some cases you may find that the SQL Server jobs for transaction log backups prevent them from running successfully. As stated above, always check your backups!

    HTH, Peter.

    Posted by Magdalen College School, 10/05/2012 at 09:01