The wise system administrator keeps backups of all critical data on his server. When backing up all the data and metadata used by the Reciprocal Net site software, it is sufficient to preserve the files beneath /var/recipnet/ and /etc/recipnet/ . It may be prudent to stop the recipnetd and mysqld daemons for the duration of the backup so that no “dirty” files get backed up.
There are four directories under /var/recipnet/:
· /var/recipnet/data/ - contains data files that have been attached to Reciprocal Net samples. This is the repository.
· /var/recipnet/db/ - used by MySQL to store its database files on behalf of recipnetd. These database files contain metadata about Reciprocal Net samples.
·
/var/recipnet/msgs-held/ - used by recipnetd to store every
inter-site message that it has received from other sites but that cannot be
processed yet
(for one reason or another). Files
stored here are not critical because they usually can be re-downloaded from
other sites automatically by recipnetd if deleted.
· /var/recipnet/msgs-recv/ – used by recipnetd to store select inter-site messages that it has received. Not all inter-site messages received get written to files, but those that do are stored here.
· /var/recipnet/msgs-sent/ - used by recipnetd to store every inter-site message that it has sent (since the site was installed). Deleting, losing, or tampering with any files in this directory might result in serious data consistency problems across all sites in the Reciprocal Net Site Network.
To restore from a previous backup onto a server that already has the Reciprocal Net site software properly configured, it is sufficient to stop the recipnetd and mysqld daemons, replace all the files under /var/recipnet/ and /etc/recipnet/ with those from the backup, and then restart mysqld and recipnetd. If the server is not already properly configured, it will be necessary for you to install the most recent site software (a free download from http://www.reciprocalnet.org), place the recipnet.sitegrant file obtained from the Reciprocal Net Coordinator in /etc/recipnet/, and modify /etc/recipnet/recipnetd.conf to match your server’s configuration.
Note that it is potentially disastrous to attempt to restore a recipnet.sitegrant file without the matching files in /var/recipnet , or to attempt to restore the files in /var/recipnet without the matching recipnet.sitegrant file. There are a number of interrelationships between the two entities; the risk is that other servers in the Reciprocal Net Site Network may become confused and cause your site to crash and lose data. If you should find yourself holding an incomplete backup of your server, please contact Reciprocal Net technical support for personal assistance.