I'm about to upgrade an app in production, but first, I want a backup in case it goes horribly wrong. I've got daily system backups, but those are system wide. The RiA book says on page 362 under "Batch Job - FTP Data Snapshot" that "This job takes a snapshot of an Objects data using a selected View and uploads it via FTP to a remote server in CSV, XLS, or XML format." The FTP Data Snapshot config screen (v3.9.1) only had a drop-down for "Reports", not objects, and I'd rather just be able to backup the entire app with all of it's objects as well as the current XML definition. In other words, I'd like to be able to take a snapshot backup of the Application, and easily restore from that snapshot if things go bad. Not possible?
It seems like "FTP Data Snapshot" name is misleading, we should find a better name for this Batch job. This job is supposed to generate report periodically and upload data.
I would recommend you create backup file - you can restore entire customer info from that file (use Master server > Customer View page).
You are correct, the name and description did not give me the impression it was meant for report generation.
Backup file contains all applications for the entire customer, right?
I don't want to have to restore all data for all apps, that would require a scheduled downtime for the entire server for every application update.
I just want to backup/restore a single app, independent of the other apps.
For app metadata you can simply create and store application XML (if you publish on App directory - history XML will be stored automatically).
Sure, exporting the App XML is a given for moving from DEV to PROD servers, but that doesn't backup the data.
Data backup is associated with customer, not with application. Unfortunately we don't have a way to backup a single application.
Yeah, I think the closest thing would be to backup the app XML, and then create Views for each object containing all its fields and export the View to XLS or CSV. It would be cool if we had a feature that did this for you on a particular App or Object; perhaps in the future -- but even this approach requires several steps to restore the data if and when you need to.
@Pavel & @Matt -- Thanks for the quick and thorough answers to my questions. I see now I should have "commented" on Pavel's original "Reply", and the best answer(s) are actually in "comments" which can't be marked as an answer. Oops!