Backing up my locally hosted rails apps in preparation for OS upgrade

Question

I have some apps running on Heroku. I will be upgrading my OS in two weeks. The last time I upgraded though (6 months ago) I ran into some problems.

Here's what I did:

• copied all my rails apps onto DVD
• upgraded OS
• transferred rails apps from DVD to new OS

Then, after setting up new SSH-keys I tried to push to some of my heroku apps and, whilst I can't remember the exact error message off-hand, it more or less amounted to "fatal exception the remote end hung up"

So I know that I'm doing something wrong here.

First of all, is there any need for me to be putting my heroku hosted rails apps onto DVD? Would I be better just pulling all my apps from their heroku repos once I've done the upgrade? What do others do here?

The reason I stuck them on DVD is because I tend to push a specific production branch to Heroku and sometimes omit large development files from it...

Secondly, was this problem caused by SSH keys? Should I have backed up the old keys and transferred them from my old OS to my new one too, or is Heroku perfectly happy to let you change OS's like that?

My solution in the end was to just create new heroku apps and reassign the custom domain names in heroku add-ons menu... I never actually though of pulling from the heroku repos as I tend to push a specific branch to heroku and that branch doesn't always have all the development files in it...

I realise that the error message I mentioned doesn't particularly help anyone but I didn't think to remember it 6 months ago. Any advice would be appreciated

PS - when I say upgrade, I mean full install of the new version with full format of the HDD.

Answer 1

One of the reasons for using a (D)VCS (Version Control System) is reproducibility (usually "reproducibility of builds", but here also the ability to reproduce a given state of a system versioned at a given time)

So it could be a good test to see if you have:

• all your system properly committed
• all the process to regenerate the extra content (if need be) you need from your restored data

Making a bundle of your repo (meaning dealing with only one file to backup somewhere else, DVD or otherwise) is a good start.

And regarding your "hung up" error message, if SSH is involved, that means you need also to save SSH keys (see comments) usually located under the user's homedir (as in ~/.ssh/authorized_key)