I need to make a Backup which can be used for disaster recovery purposes. I can make a backup using the GUI, however, I do not have the original software used to build the system. Therefore, the backup would not be much good if we lost the server.
Any suggestions?
Thank you,
Phil.
The obvious one? Go and get the software that was used to build it?
There are programs like Mondo backup which will make a backup of the system so that it can be restored from a image without the original CD’s to rebuild everything.
If you built it then you’ll know what it was and can get it again. If it was a disto from somebody like trixbox, it’s possible to get older ISO’s off sourceforge so that you can have it when you need it. If it happens to be Trixbox you might want to consider moving onto something more stable with a better forward thinking plan then them.
There are three basic components to your phone system. The OS, Asterisk and FreePBX. A distro just packages all three together in a easily usable manner. If you built it by hand then get the doc’s you used and archive those also.
Most likely you’ll end up building a newer system if and when that happens. So to safeguard your self you might want to consider updating FreePBX as it can generate it’s own backups and those can be restored and used as long as you go from version to same version. Also in the theme of moving forward the era of 2.2.3 was Asterisk 1.2 which has had all development stopped for a while now. So If given the choice of rebuilding your system today you’d probably go with Asterisk 1.4 (which FreePBX 2.2 doesn’t support if I remember correctly) and if it is a year from now it wil clearly be Asterisk 1.6. Which support for it is in FreePBX 2.5 (Started support for it in 2.4).
So you can see there are several moving parts to the system and you’ll want to think about it in more detail. The one thing that is good is if you keep your version of FreePBX current then you have support for the older version of asterisk you are using now along with the support of the newer versions that are now available today. Restoring a Current FreePBX version backup based on Asterisk 1.2 to Asterisk 1.6 is easy.
Hope that helps.