Forkbak

Creates backups of a recent fork of your primary Heroku Postgres database.

WARNING

1. This script creates forks of your database to take a backup and then destroys it. This is a regular fork, and as such it will incur costs on your heroku account.
2. Your Heroku Postgres database is protected by Continuous Protection which allows you to use Rollback to go to a prior database state, protecting against accidental data loss. Therefore this approach is not actually necessary for data protection purposes.

Usage

Assuming the app you want to take backups from is called myapp, this will take backups from a fork of DATABASE_URL on myapp

export APP=myapp
git clone git@github.com:hgmnz/forkbak.git
cd forkbak
heroku create $APP-backups
heroku addons:add pgbackups --app $APP-backups
heroku addons:add scheduler --app $APP-backups
heroku config:set APP=$APP-backups \
  FORK_FROM_APP=$APP \
  HEROKU_API_KEY=$(heroku auth:token) \
  --app $APP-backups
git push heroku master

Finally, set up a scheduled job to kick off the process every night:

heroku addons:open scheduler --app $APP-backups

Use the following values:

Settings	Value
Task	bundle exec bin/run
Dyno size	1X
Frequency	Daily

Note: It is best to create a special user account for this process, and use it's API key in the HEROKU_API_KEY config var.

Recommended: Add a logging addon to $APP.

Running manually

heroku run bundle exec bin/run --app $APP-backups

License

forkbak is copyright (c) Harold Giménez and is released under the terms of the MIT License found in the LICENSE file.