How to back up and restore ONLYOFFICE data

Jack Wallen shows you how easy it is to back up and restore data from your existing ONLYOFFICE deployment.

ONLYOFFICE (sorry for shouting) is an outstanding web-based productivity tool that includes documents, project management, CRM and contact management. Once deployed, you can then begin creating, editing, managing, sharing and working with all sorts of documents and data.

But one thing you should also do with ONLYOFFICE is back it up. You never know when disaster might strike and, when it does, you’ll want to have an updated copy of your data. Without a data backup, you could lose countless hours of work and no one wants that.

How do you back up ONLYOFFICE? It’s actually quite simple. I’m going to not only show you how to back up the data but also import backed-up data.

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What you’ll need

The only thing you’ll need to follow along is a running instance of ONLYOFFICE.

The backup solution also gives you the option to save your data to third-party storage (such as Amazon AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Rackspace Cloud Storage, kDrive, Yandex and WebDav). For this tutorial, we’re going to save it to a temporary location and then download the file to a local drive.

With that said, let’s get this done.

How to create the backup

Log into ONLYOFFICE as an admin user and click Control Panel from the main window (Figure A).

Figure A

Under COMMON SETTINGS, click Backup (Figure B).

Figure B

In the Backup settings (Figure C), select Temporary as the storage location, click the checkbox for Include Mail in backup (if you’re using the mail feature) and click MAKE BACKUP.

Figure C

Depending on how much data you have saved in ONLYOFFICE, the creation of the backup can take some time. When it does complete, you’ll see a new link labeled Download the backup. Click that link and save the tar.gz file to local storage.

That’s a manual backup. You can also create an automated backup, but for that process, you can only select one of three storage locations (Documents Module, Third-Party Storage or Computer file). Let’s opt to go with the Computer file, which will save the backup file to a directory local to the ONLYOFFICE instance.

Say, for example, you have an external drive attached to your ONLYOFFICE server that is mounted to the /data directory.

For that, go to the Automatic Data Backup section and click the ON/OFF slider until it’s in the ON position. Click Computer file and then type /data in the storage location field. Select Every Day from the Time drop-down and then select the time you want the backup to happen. Finally, select the maximum number of backups you want to retain and click SAVE (Figure D).

Figure D

The backup process will then launch at the specified time and save the file to the /data directory.

How to restore a backup

To restore from the backup we created above, you will need to have the backup file saved to local storage. If you created an automated backup, you will have to manually copy that file from the server to whatever PC you’re running the restore process from.

Once you have that file on local storage, from the Control Panel, click Restore from the left sidebar. Select Computer file from the Source list (Figure E) and then click +.

Figure E

When prompted, locate the backup file, and then, after the backup file has been uploaded (which can take some time), click the RESTORE button. Again, the restoration process will take some time (Figure F), and obviously ONLYOFFICE won’t be available during the process.

Figure F

And that’s all there is to backing up and restoring your ONLYOFFICE instance.

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