Turn on nightly backups

Your hosting keeps its own daily backups for a few days. This one is yours: every night after two in the morning (your company's time), every record and every file goes to a storage bucket in your own cloud account, outside the system.

Steps

1. Make a bucket and an access token that may read and write it. The backups setup guide shows each click on Cloudflare R2; AWS S3, Backblaze B2 and Wasabi take the same five values.
2. Open Settings, System, Connections, Services and the Backups card.
3. Paste the Endpoint, Bucket name, Region (auto for R2), Access key ID and Secret access key. Save each.
4. Press Test the key. The system writes a small file to the bucket and deletes it again.
5. Open Settings, Tools, Backups and press Back up now for the first copy, or leave it for tonight.
6. Check Tools, Backups shows Last backup with its date.

Good to know

• Nightly copies are kept 30 days; the copy from the first of each month is kept forever.
• Files are copied once and never deleted from the backup, even if you delete them in the system.
• The keys you pasted under Connections are not in the backup. After a restore you paste them again.
• A backup that started keeps going on its own if you close the screen.
• How to bring a backup back: Restore a backup.

If something goes wrong

• Test the key fails. Check the endpoint has no bucket name on the end, the region is right (auto for R2), and the token may read and write objects in that bucket.
• The secret access key is lost. It is shown once by your cloud. Make a new token and paste both values again.
• No backup has finished yet. After two in the morning it runs by itself; press Back up now to run one sooner.