Help

Our service is ideal for small or medium-sized sites written on Ruby on Rails. Most of Rails-applications work on VPS or Dedicated servers, hosting providers usually does not provide any backup for such servers. Of course, we can’t backup hi-load sites, that require custom backup system but if your whole site size is below 60 GB (our max tariff), most likely we can dandle backup of your site. Anyway, you have free 15-days trial to test our service.

Even if your site is on shared hosting with daily backup included, our service is better because it stores backup history for several weeks, you can browse backup and download any file anytime.

You install plugin to your application and provide it with our api-key. We take the rest. Our service backup your site daily, it stores only changed files and the dump of database. If you lost your data, you can restore backup automatically if your application still work and you lost only data. Or you can download your backup to your computer and restore it manually.

We provide backups only for applications written on Ruby on Rails 2 and higher. Your server environment should satisfy these requirements:

• Unix-compatible operation system.
• You should have SSH access to production server and be able to run rake tasks on production environment.
• Your server should have access to backupmyapp.com via HTTPS
• Your site should be accessible via HTTP (e.g. you can view it on browser).

Your site should work normal during backup. Plugin executes rake task with low priority, that uploads files to our server, that does not dramatically slows down your system. Site customers would not notice.

We download your files via SSH protocol to keep your data secure. SSH encrypt your data before transfer, so no one can intercept your files and read it.

We take all reasonable precautions to keep your information safe and secure. We don’t share your data to anyone and don’t read it ourselves. You can look through our Privacy Policy for detais.

Sure! You can backup as many sites as you want. The only limit is storage capacity of current tariff plan. The space each application will take is proportional to it size, so every application will have nearly equal days in backup history.

Yes. Our servers have own backup system to keep your data safe. Our servers are located in Erfurt, Germany. Data storage is set up with RAID 5 technology.

We give you 15-days free trial for all our tariff plans. Your account will be fully functional during this period and you can use our service without restrictions. During this period you can change tariff plan anytime for free to find suitable one.

Our authorized retailer is 2Checkout.com. It accepts customer orders via PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and American Express. The whole payment process works via secure https protocol.

You can change tariff anytime, the remaining paid time will be recalculated according to the new tariff. We don?t charge changing tariff plan. You can change plan on your billing info page or by clicking to “Upgrade” button in the bottom of your dashboard.

We will notify you by email one week before the end of prepaid period. If you will not pay in time, we will freeze your account. We will keep your account and all your data for 30 days, but we will pause your daily backups. You can pay anytime during this period and your account will be resumed automatically. After this suspended period, your account with all your data will be terminated.

You can pay for one or several months if you wish. We will notify you one week before the ending of your current pre-paid period.

You can cancel your account anytime, all your data will be terminated immediately. If you remove your account before the end of your current payed up period, remaining funds will not be refunded.

You should click “Add application” button on your dashboard and follow on-screen instructions. You will need to install our plugin, upload application to production server and run rake task there.

The only thing that matters is the size of your application and it database. You can check the size of your application by typing command du -shL in the production server on your application directory.

Each light indicates, has corresponding application plugin installed or not.

Our server communicates with your application via our plugin. Plugin is required to backup and restore your application. You should install it to you application and provide it with your api-key. The instructions how to install you will get during adding application process.

No, our plugin is designed only to connect to our server and to handle backup and restore processes. Our plugin has open source, so you can inspect it yourself. You can watch it on GitHub: http://github.com/crocoduck7/backupmyapp/tree.

Important warning: Please be careful on restoring your application, your current files and database will be overwritten. Please make sure that your current data is no longer important.

During backup we dump your database using MarshalDb database-independent format. It supports any database that ActiveRecord supports. We save this dump to file and store it in db/backupmyapp directory in your application.

The initial backup takes much longer time and has much bigger size. We should download your whole application with your files. Next time we will download only changed and new files but not the whole application.

The number of stored backups it limited only by your tariff. Depending the activity of your application, we can store backups for several days, weeks or even months.

We will automatically delete the most distant backup to free space for new one.

You can prevent any of your daily backups from deleting by “freezing” it. Freezed backups will not be destroyed on cleanup process.

Please contact us (support@backupmyapp.com) and we will find custom solution for you.

By default we backup these directories: app, config, db, doc, lib, log, public, script, tmp, vendor. You can choose what directories to backup if you want to save more space.

If you don’t store your application code in version control system like GIT or SVN it is better to store all directories. Of course, hidden directories of svn or git are ignored.

You can change domain name for your application on application preferences page.

If you select application on your dashboard, you can view backup list for this application in list or thumbnails view.

List view shows detailed statistics for each backup:

• New, updated and destroyed files count relative to previous backup.
• The size of each backup (summary size of new and updated files).
• Date and time of backup.

Thumbnails view is graphical representation of backup activity on your site. The columns on each backup shows it size. You can also see freezed backups on list and thumbnails view.

This information may help you to find necessary backup to restore in case of troubles.

If you want to save space for new backups you can delete any of stored backups. Destroyed backups can’t be undelete, so be careful with this.

If you select backup on list or thumbnail view, you will find yourself in file browser. Here you can inspect stored files.

To download file from backup you should select it and click “Download” button on file info panel. If you want to download the whole backup, click “Download” button on the top of file browser. You will get the whole backup on zip archive. If this is a large site it may take some time to prepare archive.

If you have troubles with your site and lost your data, you can restore any stored backup automatically. You should select backup to restore from list or thumbnails view, then you should click Restore button on the top of the page. The rest of the process will work automatically. You should have already working Rails application with plugin installed to use automatic restore.

Warning: Please, use this function with extreme caution. You may loose your existing data on working server. Please make sure that existing data on your server is not valuable any more.

You should have already working Rails application with plugin installed to use automatic restore. The restore process is handled with our plugin. If your application does not work, we can’t restore it automatically (then you should use manual restore).

Most rails applications code stored on version control system such as GIT or SVN (highly recommended), in this case you can deploy your Rails application to production server from your repository if something bad happend to your production server, but database and uploaded files will be missing. In this situation you should use automatic restore.

You can run rake backupmyapp:restore on your application directory to restore last backup. We also have the same Capistrano task for it: cap backupmyapp:restore.

If automatic restore is impossible for some reason, you can restore backup manually. Find backup to restore and click “Download” button on the top of file browser. The whole backup will be compressed to zip archive. Upload downloaded zip file to production server, unzip it and run rake backupmyapp:db_load command. It will restore database from dump.

Backup My App can help you on changing hosting provider. You can change application URL and restore last backup to new location.

You can download your last backup to development server and run rake backupmyapp:db_load command. It will create duplicate of your application.