The backup-allrevs.php script is a brute force backup tool designed to
attempt to retrieve every possible revision available from a CouchDB
compatible source (e.g. a CouchDB server or Tap Forms document).
This script is intended to help understand the detailed state of the internals of CouchDB and to retrieve what otherwise might be lost. Currently it doesn't attempt to retrieve deleted documents but will attempt to retrieve previous revisions of existing documents.
The backup-allrevs.php script takes an optional argument which is the
path to the backup location. The deafult for this is a backups folder
in the current working directory of the script.
The backup-allrevs.php script doesn't use the standard configs
directory but instead uses it's own backups directory and a
config.ini file instead of it. There is a distribution
config.ini-dist that ships in the backup directory for reference that
can be copied to config.ini in the directory where you want to backup
the data. This can be used with the following three options:
| Option Name | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| perHost | false | Controls if it should create per host backups. Enable when you are trying to recover from a sync meltdown. |
| couchHosts[] | http://localhost:5984 | An array of CouchDB hosts to scan. One per line with the square brackets included to make it an array for PHP. |
| instancePath | /tmp/tf-hosts | Path to a list of discovered Tap Forms instances. |
In running this script, it will attempt to download any revision available from any detected servers.
The backup-allrevs.php script will accept a CouchDB server as an
option and will attempt to discover any Tap Forms documents on it (e.g.
entries with a db- prefix) and then download any revisions stored
within them.
In the bin directory is a tf-finder.sh script and a
tf-finder-linux.sh script. These two scripts should create a file at
/tmp/tf-hosts with URLs matching discovered Tap Forms servers on the
local network using Bonjour or multicast DNS. This can be used with the
backup-allrevs.php script to automatically backup any Tap Forms
instance on the network.
Alternatively you can populate this file with your own entries manually
for them to be backed up. The path to this file is configurable through
the instancePath setting listed above in config.ini.
In general, running the following from the tftools directory should
get you up and running pretty quickly. This includes automatic discovery
and running CouchDB on localhost. If this isn't true, you'll need to
change your config.ini in the backup directory.
$ ./bin/tf-finder.sh
$ ./backup-allrevs.php
This should populate the /tmp/tf-hosts directory and should trigger a
backup to be created in the backups directory automatically. The
backup-allrevs.php script is verbose and will log every request it
makes. It make take some time to backup large documents.