[Koha-devel] Should we back up /usr/share/koha on a daily basis as well?

[Andreas Roussos]

Dear Developers,

In a standard package installation, the backup tarballs taken by the
`koha-common` daily cron job (which calls `koha-run-backups`, which
in turn calls `koha-dump` for each Koha instance) do not include the
default base directory (i.e. /usr/share/koha).

Indeed, including the entire /usr/share/koha tree in every instance's
backup tarball (for multi-tenant setups) would be superfluous (not to
mention space-consuming).

However, I think that some provision should be made so that a backup of
the /usr/share/koha tree is taken on a daily basis. This could be kept
at the top-level /var/spool/koha/ directory with a filename like
common-YYYY-MM-DD.tar.gz or shared-YYYY-MM-DD.tar.gz. It should even be
possible to pass the base directory path as an argument, in case it has
been changed from the default.

My reasoning behind this is that people often make local changes to the
Koha codebase, or edit the Intranet/OPAC XSLTs, or adjust the Template
Toolkit files to account for their needs. So it would be in the users'
best interest to have Koha take regular backups of these files as well.

Thoughts?

Kind regards,
Andreas