Recently during a large enhancement of a suite of applications I am working on for a client. I have thought it prudent to make backups daily before working on any of the applications. Over the past couple of weeks whilst the backup has been taking place I have been getting failures. I have reported this to zoho and as yet there is no answer back as to why this is happening. 

This takes me back to an issue we had about a month ago when a Page was deleted during development, and as I had done a backup i think the day before I attempted to restore that backup so that I could re-instate the page. However the backup would not restore even when I contacted zoho they could not get the backup to restore, the message was something like the backup is corrupted.

 

Eventually about a week or so later they managed to restore the database but in that time I had already re-created the page that was missing.

So my concern is that this was a page with no data storage within it so should have been an easy object to restore from a backup. Since this was not the case, I do have concern about how any or all of our applications can be restored if we were in a disaster recovery scenario.

Most of our applications are connected in some way and share data and deluge script functionality, which was something we consulted with zoho prior to delving in to this method and were advised that it was the right way to work.

However the downside which was not explained to us was that now we find that because the applications are linked not all of the applications or individual components ( forms reports etc) can be individually restored if the need arose.

I have asked zoho to provide within the application a log of the status at the end of each backup process taken on a schedule and also as a manual task so that there is confidence of a restorable backup or there is a warning that the backup is not restorable and we can then contact zoho for an explanation. 

I think this is a serious shortfall on Zoho's part that backups can be scheduled automatically week after week but when the time comes to restore any of them, it is found that they are corrupted and cannot be used.

From the community I can see that backups have been an issue for a number of years. Does anyone have any other methods of making safe backup copies of applications?