Backup & Recovery

• 1: Backup and Restore the United Manufacturing Hub
• 2: Backup and Restore Database
• 3: Import and Export Node-RED Flows

1 - Backup and Restore the United Manufacturing Hub

This page describes how to back up the following:

• All Node-RED flows
• All Grafana dashboards
• The Helm values used for installing the united-manufacturing-hub release
• All the contents of the United Manufacturing Hub database

It does not back up:

• Additional databases other than the United Manufacturing Hub default database
• TimescaleDB continuous aggregates: Follow the official documentation to learn how.
• TimescaleDB policies: Follow the official documentation to learn how.
• Everything else not included in the previous list

This procedure only works on Windows.

Before you begin

Download the backup scripts and extract the content in a folder of your choice.

For this task, you need to have PostgreSQL installed on your machine.

You also need to have enough space on your machine to store the backup. To check the size of the database, follow the steps below:

1. From the Pod section in UMHLens / OpenLens, click on united-manufacturing-hub-timescaledb-0 to open the details page.

2. Click the Pod Shell button to open a shell in the container.

   

   

3. Enter the postgres shell:

   psql
   

4. Connect to the database:

   \c factoryinsight
   

5. Run the following command to get the size of the database:

   SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size('factoryinsight'));
   

Backup

Generate Grafana API Key

Create a Grafana API Token for an admin user by following these steps:

1. Open the Grafana UI in your browser and log in with an admin user.
2. Click on the Settings icon in the left sidebar and select API Keys.
3. Give the API key a name and change its role to Admin.
4. Optionally set an expiration date.
5. Click Add.
6. Copy the generated API key and save it for later.

Stop workloads

To prevent data inconsistencies, you need to temporarily stop the MQTT and Kafka Brokers.

1. In UMHLens / OpenLens go to the Workloads > StatefulSets tab.
2. Select the united-manufacturing-hub-kafka StatefulSet

3. Click the Scale button to select the number of replicas for the StatefulSet.

   

   

4. Set the number of replicas to 0 and click Scale.
5. Repeat the process for the united-manufacturing-hub-hivemqce StatefulSet.

Backup using the script

The backup script is located inside the folder you downloaded earlier.

1. Open a terminal and navigate inside the folder.

   cd <FOLDER_PATH>
   

2. Run the script:

   .\backup.ps1 -IP <IP_OF_THE_SERVER> -GrafanaToken <GRAFANA_API_KEY> -KubeconfigPath <PATH_TO_KUBECONFIG>
   

   You can find a list of all available parameters down below.

   If OutputPath is not set, the backup will be stored in the current folder.

This script might take a while to finish, depending on the size of your database and your connection speed.

If the connection is interrupted, there is currently no option to resume the process, therefore you will need to start again.

Here is a list of all available parameters:

Restore

Each component of the United Manufacturing Hub can be restored separately, in order to allow for more flexibility and to reduce the damage in case of a failure.

Cluster configuration

To restore the Kubernetes cluster, execute the .\restore-helm.ps1 script with the following parameters:

.\restore-helm.ps1 -KubeconfigPath <PATH_TO_KUBECONFIG> -BackupPath <PATH_TO_BACKUP_FOLDER>

Verify that the cluster is up and running by opening UMHLens / OpenLens and checking if the workloads are running.

Grafana dashboards

To restore the Grafana dashboards, you first need to create a Grafana API Key for an admin user in the new cluster by following these steps:

1. Open the Grafana UI in your browser and log in with an admin user.
2. Click on the Settings icon in the left sidebar and select API Keys.
3. Give the API key a name and change its role to Admin.
4. Optionally set an expiration date.
5. Click Add.
6. Copy the generated API key and save it for later.

Then, on your local machine, execute the .\restore-grafana.ps1 script with the following parameters:

.\restore-grafana.ps1 -FullUrl http://<IP_OF_THE_SERVER>:8080 -Token <GRAFANA_API_KEY> -BackupPath <PATH_TO_BACKUP_FOLDER>

Restore Node-RED flows

To restore the Node-RED flows, execute the .\restore-nodered.ps1 script with the following parameters:

.\restore-nodered.ps1 -KubeconfigPath <PATH_TO_KUBECONFIG> -BackupPath <PATH_TO_BACKUP_FOLDER>

Restore the database

To restore the database, execute the .\restore-timescale.ps1 script with the following parameters:

.\restore-timescale.ps1 -Ip <IP_OF_THE_SERVER> -BackupPath <PATH_TO_BACKUP_FOLDER> -PatroniSuperUserPassword <DATABASE_PASSWORD>

What’s next

• Take a look at the UMH-Backup repository
• Learn how to manually backup and restore the database
• Read how to import and export Node-RED flows via the UI

2 - Backup and Restore Database

Before you begin

For this task, you need to have PostgreSQL installed on your machine.

You also need to have enough space on your machine to store the backup. To check the size of the database, follow the steps below:

1. From the Pod section in UMHLens / OpenLens, click on united-manufacturing-hub-timescaledb-0 to open the details page.

2. Click the Pod Shell button to open a shell in the container.

   

   

3. Enter the postgres shell:

   psql
   

4. Connect to the database:

   \c factoryinsight
   

5. Run the following command to get the size of the database:

   SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size('factoryinsight'));
   

Backing up the database

Follow these steps to create a backup of the factoryinsight database on your machine:

1. Open a terminal, and using the cd command, navigate to the folder where you want to store the backup. For example:

   • Windows
   • macOS
   • Linux

   
      cd C:\Users\user\backups
      

   
      cd /Users/user/backups
      

   
      cd /home/user/backups
      

   If the folder does not exist, you can create it using the mkdir command or your file manager.

2. Run the following command:

   pg_dump -h <REMOTE_HOST> -p 5432 -U factoryinsight -Fc -f <BACKUP_NAME>.bak factoryinsight
   

   • <REMOTE_HOST> is the IP of the server where the database is running. Use localhost if you installed the United Manufacturing Hub using k3d.
   • <BACKUP_NAME> is the name of the backup file.

Grafana database

If you want to backup the Grafana database, you can follow the same steps as above, but you need to replace any occurence of factoryinsight with grafana.

Additionally, you also need to write down the credentials in the grafana-secret Secret, as they will be needed to access the dashboard after restoring the database.

Restoring the database

This section is untested. Please report any issues you encounter.

For this section, we assume that you are restoring the data to a fresh United Manufacturing Hub installation with an empty database.

Copy the backup file to the database pod

1. Open UMHLens / OpenLens.

2. Launch a new terminal sesstion by clicking on the + button in the bottom-left corner of the window.

3. Run the following command to copy the backup file to the database pod:

   kubectl cp /path/to/local/backup.bak united-manufacturing-hub-timescaledb-0:/tmp/backup.bak
   

   Replace /path/to/local/backup.bak with the path to the backup file on your machine.

This step could take a while depending on the size of the backup file.

Temporarly disable kafkatopostrgesql

1. Navigate to Workloads > Deployments.
2. Select the united-manufacturing-hub-kafkatopostgresql Deployment.

3. Click the Scale button to select the number of replicas for the Deployment.

   

   

4. Scale the number of replicas to 0.

Open a shell in the database pod

1. From the Pod section in UMHLens / OpenLens, click on united-manufacturing-hub-timescaledb-0 to open the details page.

2. Click the Pod Shell button to open a shell in the container.

   

   

3. Enter the postgres shell:

   psql
   

4. Connect to the database:

   \c factoryinsight
   

Restore the database

1. Drop the existing database:

   DROP DATABASE factoryinsight;
   

2. Create a new database:

   CREATE DATABASE factoryinsight;
   \c factoryinsight
   CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS timescaledb;
   

3. Put the database in maintenance mode:

   SELECT timescaledb_pre_restore();
   

4. Restore the database:

   \! pg_restore -Fc -d factoryinsight /tmp/backup.bak
   

5. Take the database out of maintenance mode:

   SELECT timescaledb_post_restore();
   

Enable kafkatopostgresql

1. Navigate to Workloads > Deployments.
2. Select the united-manufacturing-hub-kafkatopostgresql Deployment.

3. Click the Scale button to select the number of replicas for the Deployment.

   

   

4. Scale the number of replicas to the original value, usually 1.

What’s next

• See the official TimescaleDB backup guide
• See the official pg_dump documentation

3 - Import and Export Node-RED Flows

Export Node-RED Flows

To export Node-RED flows, please follow the steps below:

1. Access Node-RED by navigating to http://<CLUSTER-IP>:1880/nodered in your browser. Replace <CLUSTER-IP> with the IP address of your cluster, or localhost if you are running the cluster locally.

2. From the top-right menu, select Export.

3. From the Export dialog, select wich nodes or flows you want to export.

4. Click Download to download the exported flows, or Copy to clipboard to copy the exported flows to the clipboard.

   

   

The credentials of the connector nodes are not exported. You will need to re-enter them after importing the flows.

Import Node-RED Flows

To import Node-RED flows, please follow the steps below:

1. Access Node-RED by navigating to http://<CLUSTER-IP>:1880/nodered in your browser. Replace <CLUSTER-IP> with the IP address of your cluster, or localhost if you are running the cluster locally.

2. From the top-right menu, select Import.

3. From the Import dialog, select the file containing the exported flows, or paste the exported flows from the clipboard.

4. Click Import to import the flows.