Backup at project level

FirstSpirit provides a standard functionality for backing up FirstSpirit projects. These project backups can be carried out regularly during operation via the project schedule management using the Execute project backup action. The schedule is used to back up the current status of a project including revisions (configurable), elements that have already been deleted (configurable), and database contents (configurable).

In the case of large projects in particular, a project backup can take up a lot of time and disk space (if the entire project history is also being backed up). An incremental or differential backup is not possible in this case.

The FirstSpirit archiving function can be used in addition to reduce the size of the projects. This involves transferring data that is no longer required out of a project and into archive files. These can be reinstalled at a later date if necessary or they can ultimately be deleted if they are no longer required (see function Archive). This frees up space on the hard disk, reduces loading times, and improves the performance of the FirstSpirit Server.

If this is not sufficient, the “EnterpriseBackup” module is recommended for backing up data on a regular basis in large projects (see Documentation FirstSpirit EnterpriseBackup).

Remote projects: If the project has dependencies on other projects (“remote projects”), the corresponding configurations are backed up in the project but not the remote projects themselves or referenced elements from the remote projects.

CorporateContent: Dependencies via the (license-dependent) CorporateContent functionality are not taken into account by the project backup.

Restore projects
To restore a project that was backed up by a manual or automatic backup, the backup file simply needs to be copied from the backup directory to the server's export directory. From there the project can be imported normally (from the server) (see Import Project).

Distinction from recovering editorial states: Editorial scenarios are generally covered implicitly by the FirstSpirit revision history. There is no need to import a backup in order to recover editorial states, provided that the FirstSpirit project or its repository is not corrupt. The editors can recover any state of a FirstSpirit object directly using the version history.

In the absence of any other suitable data backup measures, we strongly recommend configuring at least one project backup for each FirstSpirit project and executing it (automatically) on a regular basis in order to ensure there is a basic data backup process in place.