Heroku Cloud Backup

The heroku_cloud_backup gem adds a rake task to your project that will take backups stored with Heroku's PGBackup addon and upload them to the cloud.

It's recommended that you use this gem in conjunction with the heroku_backup_task gem. heroku_backup_task adds a rake tasks that will create a fresh database capture and expire the oldest backup if you're at your capture limit.

First, you need to enable the Heroku PGBackups addon:

heroku addons:add pgbackups:basic

If you want this to run daily, you'll need to enable the Heroku cron addon:

heroku addons:add cron:daily

For Rails 3 and later, add this to your Gemfile:

gem 'heroku_backup_task'
gem 'heroku_cloud_backup'

For Rails 2.1 and later, add this to your in your environment.rb:

config.gem 'heroku_backup_task'
config.gem 'heroku_cloud_backup'

In your Rakefile:

require "heroku_backup_task"
require "heroku_cloud_backup"
task :cron do
  HerokuBackupTask.execute
  HerokuCloudBackup.execute
end

The first thing you'll want to do is configure the addon.

HCB_PROVIDER (aws, rackspace, google) - Add which provider you're using. Required

heroku config:add HCB_PROVIDER='aws' # or 'google' or 'rackspace'

HCB_BUCKET (alphanumberic characters, dashes, period, underscore are allowed, between 3 and 255 characters long) - Select a bucket name to upload to. This the bucket or root directory that your files will be stored in. If the bucket doesn't exist, it will be created. Required

heroku config:add HCB_BUCKET='mywebsite'

HCB_PREFIX (Defaults to "db") - The direction prefix for where the backups are stored. This is so you can store your backups within a specific sub directory within the bucket. heroku_cloud_backup will also append the ENV var of the database to the path, so you can backup multiple databases, by their ENV names. Optional

heroku config:add HCB_PREFIX='backups/pg'

HCB_MAX (Defaults to no limit) - The number of backups to store before the script will prune out older backups. A value of 10 will allow you to store 10 of the most recent backups. Newer backups will replace older ones. Optional

heroku config:add HCB_MAX=10

HCB_REGION (AWS defaults 'us-east-1', Rackspace defaults to :dfw) - The region of the provider. Optional

heroku config:add HCB_REGION=us-west-1

Depending on which provider you specify, you'll need to provide different login credentials.

For Amazon:

heroku config:add HCB_KEY1="aws_access_key_id"
heroku config:add HCB_KEY2="aws_secret_access_key"
heroku config:add HCB_REGION="us-east-1"

For Rackspace:

heroku config:add HCB_KEY1="rackspace_username"
heroku config:add HCB_KEY2="rackspace_api_key"
heroku config:add HCB_REGION="dfw"

For Google Storage:

heroku config:add HCB_KEY1="google_storage_secret_access_key"
heroku config:add HCB_KEY2="google_storage_access_key_id"

You can run this manually like this:

heroku rake heroku_backup
heroku rake heroku:cloud_backup

I would recommend you create a temporarily public url from your cloud storage. I do this with Cyberduck. It has a neat feature where you can right click on a file and it'll generate temporarily accessible urls to that file, with the auth params for it. So once you have that url you can store like this:

heroku pgbackups:restore 'http://my-bucket-name.s3.amazonaws.com/db/DATABASE_URL/2011-06-09-014500.dump?authparameters'