Tractorbeam: How We Solved Off-site Backup for Drupal 8 without Nodesquirrel. And you can too!

Since its introduction, NodeSquirrel was the go-to solution for Drupal off-site backup. As a developer, you would only need to install the Backup and Migrate module, create a NodeSquirrel account, and you’d be set! So naturally, it’s what we reached for when our client’s brand new site need automated backups last Fall. And that's where we ran into a snag. The client’s site was running on Drupal 8. While there was a Backup and Migrate module for Drupal 8, it was currently in development and had no stable release. Worse, there was no NodeSquirrel support at all! In this talk we'll go through Tractorbeam, an open source implementation freely available for use on Ansible Galaxy to create a multi-tier, off-site backup for any MySQL-backed website, including Drupal 6, 7, or 8. No Drupal-specific utilities or code are utilized in Tractorbeam. Heck, in theory, you could use it to backup a Wordpress site as well but we haven't implemented that just yet.