Backup and Restore a Custom Web Application

For EnterMedia 8 and 9 installed without Docker

It is probably best to backup the entire "entermedia" directory periodically (default path is /opt/entermedia). This location is all-encompassing. This directory contains the webapp and tomcat information. All other dependencies can be re-installed from our install script if necessary. (/views/learningcenter/wiki/CentOS_Installer.html)

If something goes wrong and you need to restore from the backup, simply replace the /opt/entermedia directory with your backup entermedia directory. The path /opt/entermedia/webapp holds application specific files, so going any deeper than that will bypass a lot of important information.

One particular directory that is important is /opt/entermedia/webapp/WEB-INF/data. This folder holds information such as asset metadata and user data. The metadata information is stored in /opt/entermedia/webapp/WEB-INF/data/media/catalogs/{catalog}/assets/{category}/{asset file name}/data.xml, where the names in {} are particular elements of a category set.

Backing up all of the data in EnterMedia can take up a lot of space, as this includes original and generated media. For this reason, we recommended that you create a symbolic link of /opt/entermedia/webapp/WEB-INF/data and point it to an external location, possibly on another drive (e.g. F:/data) where all of the data will live.

Rough approximation of entermedia folder hierarchy:

/entermedia + /tomcat + /webapp + + /{application_folders} + + /WEB-INF + + - /base + + - /lib + + + /data + + + - /media/users + + + + /media/catalogs/{catalog} + + + + - /originals + + + + - /generated