 Server Maintenance and Backups How do I maintain a Galaxy Server? What happens if I lose everything? Learn about different maintenance steps, learn what to back up and how to recover. Server Maintenance One of the important admin tasks is to keep an eye on the storage consumption. Every instance should have a data-wrenching policy defined and shared with users. The codebase contains scripts that can assist with cleaning up and reclaiming space. The GX Admin tool can assist with invoking these scripts. Cleanup scripts provide various options for filtering on which datasets to take action. Use the dry run option to verify what datasets you are about to affect. Some available actions are safer than others. For example delete userless histories. When something is marked deleted, it still exists with a deleted flag. Once purged the file is gone. You worry about aggressive storage reclamation. It can aggravate users. Well-defined and updated data retention policy brings benefits. One of the included scripts can send templated email to the affected users. Take advantage of this to give your users some time to back up their data before you reclaim the space. Galaxy generates intermediate data as part of the job execution. These should be automatically cleaned up unless you change the cleanup underscore job flag in Galaxy's configuration. Backups Many parts of Galaxy are convenient to backup since they are straight folder hierarchies. Use your system's recommended way to backup Galaxy's database. If you have local modifications to Galaxy's code backup those as well. In case of an incident do not rush even when pressure is piling. Careful planning of the restoration procedure will save you from hasty recovery attempts with errors. Consider running a recovery drill pretending that for example your Galaxy machine was wiped. Use configuration management, for example Ansible. Store configuration management in Git. Back up the parts of Galaxy that can't be recreated. Thank you for watching.