Understanding application backup
In a nutshell
Application Backup helps save copies of an app’s data, configuration, and code to prevent loss during system failures or updates. It ensures automated and cloud-based backups for rapid recovery and business continuity, essential for safeguarding app integrity.
Availability
- Application backup is only available in the paid plans of Creator.
- Application backup can be created and managed by the super admin and admins.
1. Overview
In Creator, application backup allows you to safeguard your app by creating copies of its schema, data, and files. With this feature, you can easily restore your application to a previous state, ensuring business continuity and data security. Backups can be automated or performed manually, giving you full control. This ensures that, in the event of data loss or unexpected issues, you can recover your app quickly and efficiently, minimizing downtime.
1.1 Use case
Rollback Mechanism
If your customer contact details are stored in your application report, accidental deletions can lead to data loss. However, regular backups provide an efficient rollback mechanism, allowing you to restore data to a previous day's state, removing any unintended changes while keeping essential information intact. This ensures smooth recovery and minimizes disruptions to your operations.
1.2 Navigation guide
Access Backup under the Applications section in Operations under Manage in the left panel of the Zoho Creator Dashboard.
2. Backup in Zoho Creator
Application Backup includes three tabs to manage and view your backups:
- Backups: Displays successful backups for each application, containing all relevant details for easy reference and restoration.
- Scheduled Backups: You can schedule backups to create an automated backup system that runs based on your specific requirements. Shows all scheduled backups, with options to activate or deactivate each backup as needed, offering flexibility in backup management.
- Backup Logs: Displays detailed logs for each backup, including the status (success or failure) and all relevant information needed for auditing and troubleshooting.
2.1 Backups
The Backups tab contains key information about each backup, organized as follows:
- Application: The name of the application being backed up.
- Backup Date: Shows the date and time of the most recent backup in your timezone. To adjust the timezone, navigate to the Organization tab. Learn more
- Includes: This specifies the components included in the backup like:
- Schema Only: Backs up the application without any data, saving the .DS file of the application. Learn more about .DS Files
- Schema + Data: Backs up both the application schema and associated data.
- Schema + Data + Files: Backs up the entire application, including data and any attached files.
Note: This option is only applicable when the backup frequency is set to Now. - Version: Indicates the backup version, where the highest number is the most recent.
- Expiry: Displays the date when the backup will expire. Backups are automatically deleted after their retention period that was selected while creating the backup, but you can delete them manually anytime. To retain a backup indefinitely, download it to your local storage. Learn how to download a backup
- File Size: Specifies the size of the backup file.
2.2 Manage backups
To manage your backups, hover over a backup and click on the three-dot (meatball) menu. From here, you’ll see additional options to help you effectively manage your backups.
- Download: Obtain a copy of your backup files to your local storage for safekeeping or offline access.
- Restore: Bring back a previous version of your application from a backup, ensuring your data and settings are reverted to the desired state.
- Delete: Remove backups that are no longer needed permanently. This helps to free up storage space and maintain an organized backup system.
Learn how to perform all these actions
Note: Once the application is restored, you can ensure that your users can access the new application via the URL by editing the link to match the one users are familiar with. Keep in mind that two applications cannot share the same link, so modifying or deleting the old application link will facilitate this process. Learn how to change the URL of an application
2.3 Filter backups
You can apply the following criteria to filter backups, and each filter option works independently:
- Application: Select specific applications to view only their corresponding backups.
- Backup Date: Filter by a specific date or within a designated date range to narrow down the backup history.
- Expiration Period: Choose backups based on their retention periods, allowing you to easily find backups that are nearing expiration.
2.4 Size limit for backups
The file size of downloaded ZIP backups is limited as follows:
- Schema only (without widgets): 50 MB
- Schema only (with widgets): 100 MB
- Schema with application data: 1 GB
- Schema, application data, and files: 4 GB
2.5 Scheduled backups
You can schedule backups to create an automated backup system that runs based on your specific requirements. This ensures that your data is consistently backed up without the need for manual intervention.
The Scheduled Backups section provides essential details about each backup schedule, including:
- Application: The name of the application for which the backup is scheduled.
- Frequency: Indicates how often the backup is set to occur, with options including:
- Now: A backup is triggered immediately.
- Daily: Backups are scheduled to occur every day.
- Weekly: Backups are scheduled on a weekly basis.
- Monthly: Backups are scheduled to occur once a month.
- Scheduled Time: Displays the specific time (in Indian Standard Time) when the backup will be executed. You can choose a convenient time for the backup to occur, including options for scheduling a nightly backup to minimize disruption during business hours.
- Expiry In: Shows the retention period for the scheduled backup, indicating when it will be automatically deleted.
- Incremental Backup: Allows you to enable incremental backups for the selected schedule. When enabled, only the data changes made since the last full backup, such as newly created records and updates to existing data, are backed up, helping reduce backup time and storage usage.
- Status: Indicates whether the backup schedule is currently active or inactive, allowing for easy management of backup operations.
Learn how to activate or deactivate a backup
2.5.1 Incremental backups
Note: Contact support to enable incremental backups for your account.
Incremental backups can be enabled when creating scheduled backups to optimize backup time and storage usage while keeping your data up to date. An incremental backup captures only the changes made since the last successful full backup, ensuring that recent updates are preserved without repeating the entire backup. This helps:
- Reduce backup time
Optimized storage usage
Frequent backup capability
When creating or editing a scheduled backup with Daily or Weekly frequency and components as Schema + Data, you can enable the Incremental Backup. Once enabled, you can select how often the incremental backups should run between full backups like every 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours, 6 hour, 12 hours, or 24 hours. Learn how to create and manage an incremental backup
Note:
- If schema changes such as form or field property changes occur while incremental backup is in progress, the current incremental backup will be stopped and will resume only after the next scheduled full backup.
- Modifying the incremental interval or switching to a regular scheduled backup will stop the current incremental backup cycle. A new backup cycle will begin based on the updated schedule.
How incremental backups work
When incremental backup is enabled alongside a scheduled full backup, Creator runs two distinct backup operations:
Full backup - Runs at the configured schedule time and captures the complete application schema and data.
Incremental backup - Runs at the configured interval (for example, every hour) and captures only the records created or modified after the last successful full backup.
Each incremental run is stored as a separate version and does not contain the complete application data.
2.6 Backup logs
The Backup Logs section provides detailed information about each backup operation, including:
- Application: The name of the application associated with the backup.
- Time (IST): The timestamp indicating when the backup operation occurred, displayed in Indian Standard Time.
- Status: Indicates the outcome of the backup operation, with possible statuses including:
- Initiated: The backup process has started.
- Completed: The backup has been successfully completed.
- Failed: The backup encountered an error and did not complete successfully.
- Message: This message provides detailed information on the status of your backup operation. If a backup or restore process fails, it includes the specific reason for the failure, for example:
- App is locked for encryption
- Max size limit exceeded
- App is being published to production environment
- Error occurred during the DS export
- An unexpected error occurred (general cases)
Once you resolve the issue, you can take the back up again. In the event of a failure, an email will also be sent to your account containing additional information about the error.
2.7 Download format
When you download a backup, the application's relevant files are compressed and saved as a ZIP file. Upon opening this ZIP file, you'll find a folder that includes a meta file containing the DS script of your application's schema. Additionally, there will be a folder containing all the data collected within the application, as well as another folder with all associated files, including documents, images, and videos gathered.
Each zip file in the backup download is limited to 256 MB. If the content exceeds this limit, it will be split across multiple zip files.
3. Points to note
- Currently, there is no support for Integration field data handling in backup and restore.
- In case of scheduled backups, files in your Creator applications will not be backed up.
- For applications with environments enabled, only the Production environment can be backed up. Backups for the Development and Staging environments are not available. Learn more about Environment
- Portal users will not be included in backups; however, you can manually export portal users if needed. Learn more on how to export portal users
4. Related topics
5. Related tutorials
What's next
Previous
What's next
Previous
If you are looking to download only the schema of an application, you can download the application as a DS file.
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