Backup and Restore when doing upgrade Dangerous?

General Help
1

I am starting to think that perhaps backup and restore could be causing instability in a system. For example, a restore overwrites (correct me if i am wrong) the config files in Asterisk. For example, zapata.conf, extensions.conf, sip.conf and basically all the .conf files, so isnt this bad? for example .conf files might have newer instructions or functions or commands, by doing a restore wouldnt we be overiding these newer conf files?

So for example upgrading from Asterisk 1.2 to 1.4 or doing even a fresh install. most people will do the backup, do the upgrade to a newer asterisk and then isnt it likely they will have major complications when doing a restore from an older version?

I say this because I have seen instability, i did a backup on a really old FreePBX edition, i am getting huge instability in Asterisk, but its a good question in general since as new Asterisk releases come out i wouldnt want to backup and restore rather than do it all manually.

2

the backup module has a lot of deficiencies this being one of them. It also happens to be one of those modules that is not very exciting for a developer to work on (and what it really needs is a rewrite). Especially that it ends up being a fairly time consuming module to deal with. So if someone wants to rally the community to come up with a few thousand dollars to pay a developer to rewrite this then maybe we can finally see a more robust backup/restore facility. Otherwise, it remains on the long list that is slowly being chipped away at.

Philippe Lindheimer - FreePBX Project Lead
http//freepbx.org - IRC #freepbx

3

So Philippe would you say that unless your doing a backup and restore from similar versions that this is not wise to do accross major differences in FreePBX versions, or even in different Asterisk versions?

4

you should never restore to a version different from the version you backed up to. There are too many potentially different or subtle issues that could bite you.

Philippe Lindheimer - FreePBX Project Lead
http//freepbx.org - IRC #freepbx

5

OH YEAH, I 100% agree, i am having major problems right now bec of this, but totally agree, going to redo my machine manually

Thanks for the info though it was good to get confirmation

6

Philippe, any new work been done in 2.4 which overcomes the shortcomings of backup and restore?

Also is there a way, using PHPmyadmin, that i can just do an export to a SQL file, then in the newer version of FreePBX just do an import of the SQL into the same table, at that point i assume i can activate some script manually which will take MySQL and populate .conf files. I am really looking just for basics like extensions. Settings for auto attendants and voicemails i am not as concerned. My biggest problem is just not bringing over old Conf files from previous Asterisk versions.

I dont mind re-creating a handful of auto attendant, ring groups, queues, etc, but to do Extensions is the most intensive.

Any thoughts would be most appreciated.

Thanks

7

very little if any has changed in 2.4. I posted some potential bug fixes a couple of days ago on this forum (you’ll have to search the recent posts, it shouldn’t be too far down and is about backups). If those help fix some of the problems, I’ll get them in. As far as restoring just the MySQL data - you are only getting part of the pie. There are probably half a dozen flat files used for storage as well as the entire astdb that needs to be restored.
To get Backup raised on the priority list to really spend some time fixing it (which probably means rewriting it) is going to take some bribes because there are so many other things on this list that are “more interesting” to work on for fun then backup/restore. (Or if someone wants to step up to the plate and write a new backup/restore - that sort of bribe would also be welcome).