Backup & Restore Issues

FreePBX Tips and Tricks
1

So I’ve recently started working on a customer’s FreePBX Distro. Apparently it was installed by an older IT guy that is no longer with their company. It is v2.5.1.5 and I’m fairly comfortable with everything except the Backup & Restore and Update process.

I would like to get a Backup onto my PC, rather than the FreePBX box. I’ve looked in the forum postings and else where online and I don’t see any of the options that people have mentioned. I don’t see any preconfigured schedules, nor anywhere to drag and drop anything. I did create a “Now” schedule and did a local backup, but I don’t see anything in the Backup or Restore sections that would allow me to save it to my PC. I’ve read quite a few posts and the usual reply seems to be “Update your modules to the latest version.” But I would prefer to have a separate backup before I do this…

Also as far as updates, assuming I can get a good backup, is there any progression of updates I should do to get it up to the current version, or can I just do the normal update process and go straight from 2.5.x to 5.211.x?

Thanks in advance for any replies

2

You are using a very old version of FreePBX, your options through the GUI are limited and will work on the directory /var/lib/asterisk/backups/backupname/ where the files will be called (date).tar.gz you will have to use scp or rsync or if windowsbound perhaps putty to get them off the server, (and then back on :slight_smile: ). If you look carefully you can choose some preconfigured schedules or create your own custom one for backing up, restoring is always manually triggered.

You can upgrade FreePBX iteratively through the “module admin” module but not directly to a FreePBX “distro”, if you want or need that you would better install the a whole new system and restore from a backup from a similar version of FreePBX (always backup between FreePBX version upgrade in case of unforeseen problems), the wiki here might help you with some of that process.

3

It is also running on an old Dell desktop machine, which is one of the reasons I was paranoid about the local backups. I will recommend a new machine/install to my customer. Thanks a lot!