How to backup the Helpdesk Pilot data to an external location

It is strongly recommended that you take a backup of your Helpdesk Pilot data and save this in some external location, which could be another machine on your network.In the unfortunate event of the virtual machine (VM) crashing and going to an irreversible state, you can simply download a fresh image of the Helpdesk Pilot VM and restore the data, which you have saved on some external location.

This article details how this can be done using an FTP client. 

1. Install FTP server on the Helpdesk Pilot VM

Firstly, you will have to install FTP on the VM. To do this,

• Log in as superuser (password: superuser)
• Type sudo -s and enter the password above again
• Type apt-get --assume-yes install vsftpd

2. Take a backup

You can perform a backup of your Helpdesk Pilot data in its current state (attachment files and database) by doing,

hdp-manage backup create

This will create and store the backup under /hdp/backups

See here for scheduling a cron to take backups.

3. Connect and download via FTP client on another machine

You can download a free FTP client like Filezilla (http://filezilla-project.org/) or Cyberduck (http://cyberduck.ch/) and install it on the machine where you want to store the backup. 

You can then open the FTP program and connect to the Helpdesk Pilot VM, with the following details:

FTP hostname: The IP address of the VM

FTP username: hdp

FTP password: hdp

Once you have connected, you can browse to /hdp/backups and locate the backup folder. You can then download this backup to the machine where you have connected from and save the backed up folder in a secure location.

This way the backup has now been stored in an external location.

Note: Installing FTP server on the Helpdesk Pilot virtual machine is something to be aware of, in case your help desk is available publicly over the internet. We recommend you ensure turning off the FTP server on the VM, once the backup has been copied over to  the destination. 

To stop the FTP server, 

• Login as superuser
• Type sudo service vsftpd stop