If you recently installed Nexus and have started using it to support internal development and collaboration, you will likely want to know how to configure backups to capture your configuration files and repository data.   Any system as central to your development effort as a repository manager needs to be backed up on a daily basis.   Hard drives and power supplies fail, and critical repository artifacts in a hosted repository may be inadvertently deleted.

In this post, I go through the recommended procedures for backing up a Nexus installation.   I discuss which files and directories need to be backed up, and I make some specific recommendations about backup configuration.   Luckily, Nexus was designed to use the filesystem to store both configuration and repository data.   This means that backing up your Nexus installation is as easy as configuring an automated backup tool such as amanda or a simple backup script that uses rsync.   There is no database to export or server to suspend for the duration of the backup.  Backing up or restoring a Nexus installation is as easy as copying a set of files. Continue reading →