Backing up your VIVO Installation

These instructions are for how to backup your VIVO installation, and what to backup.

There are three or four components that you will want to backup

The VIVO home directory.
1. This holds the Solr search index. The search index is not vital to a backup, since it can be rebuilt. However, rebuilding the index is time-consuming
2. Also holds any uploaded image files, and any customized RDF files.
3. Holds your runtime.properties file.
The VIVO relational database.
1. This holds all of your instance data (people, organizations, etc), as well as any customizations that you entered through the GUI.
The VIVO RDF store.
1. In most cases, the VIVO RDF store is held in the VIVO relational database (above), but at some sites it might be in a separate triple-store.
The VIVO installation directory.
1. If you have customized the templates or the Java code, you will want to preserve those changes.
2. At a minimum, this directory contains your build.properties file.

Prior to release 1.6:

RDF files were not stored in the VIVO home directory
The build.properties and runtime.properties files were a single file, called deploy.properties in the VIVO installation directory.

Step-by-step guide

If you've made changes to code, e.g. changes to freemarker template files, etc... then you might want to consider branching the VIVO and Vitro github repositories. This would act as a "backup" of any changes that you've made and backups would be handled by, say, github. There is a vivo project template on Github that is an example of this approach. It uses Git submodules to track the VIVO and Vitro code and keeps local modifications in the local git repository. A VIVO site could clone this repository and have a blank instance to get started with and have the benefit of any local changes being in a git repository. The Brown VIVO modifications are a working example of this approach.