Right now, you can dump most of the TroopTrack data, but you can’t get a backup of the public/private webpages nor the troop’s documents.
We have a ton of web content, and we’re concerned about someone fat-fingering and deleting something that would be hard to re-create.
Thanks!
-Eoin
Hi @Eoin,
Thank you for this suggestion!
I like this idea but let’s get a little more feedback from the community before we proceed.
Thank you!
I’ve been there on the wrong side of the delete button.
Our Troop assigned our Scout Webmaster to be responsible for the content of a Scouting information section of the Internal and External webpages. I asked our Scout Webmaster to delete some pages that were generated by adults after he updated new ones generated by Scouts.
He hit the delete button when looking at the root page of the Scout section and deleted all his work including the parent pages that were suppose to be removed in addition to a larger parent section of documents.
Right now - we make it a process to export the code of the page (from editting the page) to a word document after making an update to the pages. Not ideal - but cutting and pasting code back into a new page is a lot easier. We have already recovered one page this way.
I would love to have a “Export / Backup” button for the websites.
To me, it’s a no-brainer. Even if it’s an adult access only to re-install, we should be able to have a backup once a week, with the ability to choose up to 4 weeks back. Even without fat-fingers, with all the hacking going on, one hacked account can wipe out an entire troop.
Hi @ScottHorton,
TroopTrack is extremely secure. Security, however, is a multi-part game. We keep things safe on our end from hackers, but your Troop is also responsible for keeping your passwords and account information safe. Someone can’t just fight their way into your account and delete your information. If you reveal the password and username of a person with full account access, then it can be destroyed due to your own negligence (of course you would never do this. It’s just the scenario). This is another reason why we have the privileges system. If a disgruntled parent tries to get on and delete everything, they won’t be able to if you are using privileges correctly. You do have the ability (through our reports feature) to download CSV’s and backups for almost everything.
What they are talking about above is specifically the web pages feature. We are definitely considering this feature (the ability to download a backup of your web pages like you can for pretty much any other information), but it’s not easy and needs to be discussed more.
Thanks for posting your concerns.
My issue with security wasn’t with TT but with us. If one of us with full access, or even just the web, get hacked. After writing a lengthy response, it boils down to yes, our bad, now how can we recover. Our web was punked, now we need to change all passwords, and re-establish our public face. We still need to have the ability to quickly restore lost information.
thanks
Hi @ScottHorton,
You have several options here. If you are up to date on your turbonet advancement reports, you will be able to restore any lost or damaged information. You may also create reports for your scouts, ranks, merit badges, etc. and export them as CSV files. I believe we can use those to restore any lost or damage information. We may consider a paid service in the future to store backups and allow you to view and restore using backups like you described. But it wouldn’t be cheap for any of us. 
The best policy is just to be careful. At TroopTrack, we change our passwords frequently and we have to log in each time we use TroopTrack. For us, sharing our passwords is not only a fireable offense, but may be prosecution-worthy.
Just for general guidelines: Log out every time you are finished using TroopTrack. Do not write down your password (keep it in your head). Don’t be afraid to change your password (passphrases are even better) frequently. Every quarter you might put out an email saying “It’s time for everyone to change their passwords”. If you do this, even if someone hacks your computer, they should not be able to access your TroopTrack account and your information will be safe. At a minimum, those with unit access should follow these guidelines.
Thanks!
I wouldn’t expect you to save our data for us, but it would be nice to be able to download a container with all the TroopTrack data + Web page + troop documents.
We could download this after each major update to our site (perhaps once per year). Of course, we’d need a way to re-up load all or part of this data. The troop documents could be a problem, as you’d have to be able to restore the URL since some of our Web pages refer to the Troop Documents via URL.
Thanks for considering this feature.
-Eoin
I think… at the very least, it would be nice if there was a clear process for requesting restores of a site – is there?
If you already have a backup process - what is your policy? How frequently are backups made?
Thanks
Mike
I like this thread. I’m going to explain a bit about our data backup strategy, then talk about some possible features.
TroopTrack database is backed up every second. We can restore the database to any point of time. We have never needed to do this, but the possibility is there.
This backup strategy is for the entire database, so any database restoration would be for all TroopTrack customers, not just an individual troop, page, user, etc. We do not have the capability to roll back mistakes users make, such as deleting photo albums, web pages, etc. These backups are intended for catastrophic data loss/corruption only, not user errors.
I hope that is helpful.
Now, for the issue of web pages, I have a couple of ideas. Some of them may be mutually exclusive.
Add the ability to mark a page as published to web pages. Then, instead of deleting a page, you could just unpublish it. We could also disable deleting published pages, so that you have to take two steps to delete: 1) Unpublish 2) Delete.
Change the way we delete pages to be a “soft” delete that you can restore for a few minutes if you accidentally screwed up. You see this in gmail, where you delete an email or archive it and there is an “undo” link available afterwards.
Add versioning to web pages so you can go back to a previous version of a page if you made some horrendous mistake.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Please let me know what you think. Web pages have been on my mind lately.
Best wishes,
Dave
Well…
I understand I can get a “backup” of my data by printing reports. It’s not ideal, and puts me in position of having to manually type things in to recover. I’m sure as the owner of TroopTrack.com, you wouldn’t want to be in the position of typing things manually if someone made a mistake, and that’s why you’re probably synchronizing every second for disaster-recovery or to roll-back a programming mistake…
But from my perspective, whether ALL of TroopTrack is down, or my site is mistakenly/intentionally destroyed, hacked, etc. etc. – the effect is equally disastrous.
Here’s an example: Say, if someone starts deleting user records, or putting in bad information because, you know, they were up at 3AM and making honest mistakes with their face on the keyboard. Nobody I know… completely theoretical.
Now, I don’t mind typing in a few things, but as a volunteer… this gig is already soaking up quite a bit of my time.
Can you think of a way that we could hit a button, and have a process that makes a ZIP or TAR file of our entire “site” that we can download? Then… in case of emergency, an administrator could push another button that restored the entire site from this downloaded file? The ZIP or TAR would include the HTML of every web page we’ve created, plus exports (to an open format like CSV) of every table in our database.
I think, at least from my point of view, I’d be happy to take on the burden of pushing the button to take the backups of my site and storing them, if you could take on the burden of creating the magic buttons 
Whaddayasay?
It’s an interesting idea. It is technically possible and we’ve considered it in the past. It would be a significant effort on our part and would probably require us to add additional servers in our stack to handle the load. Would you be willing to pay more for this feature?
Time is money.
Yes.
Another idea could be versioning and a recycle bin, for pages and records.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
Mike
Dave, So what is the backup strategy for Scout specific data? As we have transitioned off TroopMaster I have wondered this as I am frequently asked to backup data by TroopMaster. I just have not had the time to look into this.
Here is an AppleScript (sorry folks, Macintosh only) that will make copies of all your Private Web pages plus copies of all your Troop Documents.
Hope someone finds this useful.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20145162/TroopTrack_SaveWebPagesAndTroopDocs.app.zip
Once downloaded, use control-click-open to open this Application (source code is inside of App and can be customized by using Script Editor)
YIS
A full backup in the form of a .zip or .tar.gz or something similar would be awesome. Even better would be the ability to back it up on another server somewhere else where it can be retrieved via TroopTrack and restored. I am in full support of this idea!!!
Great ideas here! Are any of these in consideration for development? Thread has been quiet for a bit.
Yes some form of a automated zip file would be good enough. I suppose that might take the form of something in the background that does the correct queries and web requests.
It sure would be a good selling point to be able to tell people that this feature exists. It is a hop skip and jump from that to being able to email it once a month or put it onto a dropbox or something once a month as well.
I’ll add to the chorus calling for some sort of backup and recovery mechanism. Your trooptrack.com wide backups keep the system running but are essentially useless to the individual user needing to recover from a catastrophe. I work on both WordPress and Joomla websites and the best model I can point you to is Akeeba Backup. It performs regular backups of site files and the database and has a seamless restoration process. (It’s the preferred tool for taking your site from one hosting provider to another.) https://www.akeebabackup.com
Another quibble I have is that the Notes field is not accessible in any way other than desktop Rank/MB Book > kid by kid > view/edit modal box. It’s not exported in CSV reports so that content would be impossible to recover from any currently available ‘backup’ method, other than lots and lots of screen captures. (We use Notes to record partially complete items, and for the adult entering the achievement to put in their initials.)
I like the Export to CSV option that was recently added. Can this be expanded further to a) create a single zip / tar file for a new option Export everything and b) have it automatically create backups every morning and allow you to download the last x zip files for local backup? I want the system to keep nightly backups for the last x weeks and make them available for download for end-users (admin and scoutmaster).
We really need a way to track history of changes and this is the only way I found so far we can see what changed if we needed. Its becoming more and more important for us to be able to track when things like scout achievements were changed. Having something like this would allow us to investigate when data was changed inadvertently.