Backup strategies
Everything in Jenkins is a flat file on the controller. This makes the backup very concise – just one directory, jenkins_home
, needs to be backed up. We just need to determine the frequency and methods of backups.
Let's consider the tools that we have for a backup. Generally speaking, there are two methods: disk snapshots and file copies. We'll start with a disk snapshot, which is the simpler of the two.
Snapshotting the entire disk as an image
A disk snapshot creates an image that represents the controller's storage at a specific time. For example, on AWS Jenkins, the controller host's EBS volume would be snapshotted, and on firewalled Jenkins, the controller host's disk would be snapshotted.
The biggest advantage of a disk snapshot is that the backup and restore responsibilities can be delegated to a different group. The snapshot mechanism is uniform across all OSes and applications, so corporate IT-provisioned...