3CX Automated Backup Feature Priceless !
Finally a feature worth every penny. While backups are considered a mundane buried in the background task, the time comes when you need to restore from backup you feel like you found the Holy Grail. 3CX has come a long way in listening to what IT administrators want. In v15 the ability to to perform scheduled backup is a simple and painless way of creating daily backups but the really cool feature is in the being able to select your location locally, ftp or on Google Drive.
One of our clients had a primary SSD hard drive failure on their PBX. This customer has a small office with a dozen employees and a simple PC that was dedicated for the PBX. While I recommend at minimum a RAID 1 mirror for PBX systems, they figured it was a brand new PC with an SSD drive, so what could go wrong, right?
Monday morning rolls around and the phones would not connect to the system. Why is it the gremlins only mess with equipment late Sunday night? Always works Friday when they leave but ALWAYS Monday morning it doesn't. Regardless, they had a PC with a bad drive. We were able to remotely install the 3CX software on another machine using the backup that was stored on Google Drive. Good news was the SIP trunk we configured from our end has DID failover that are routed to the clients cell phones.
The key was setting up the backups to Full backups and making sure "Include License Key Information & FQDN" is selected. This is important for your phones to properly reconnect especially since your FQDN is part of your provisioning URL.
Key steps are
I think moving forward I would share this story and insist on RAID 1 minimum, hosted or implement failover. I think RAID 1 maybe the most cost effect for small offices on a budget. I am still out on hosted as other points of failure such as internet outages maybe more frequent in nature than a dead hard drive.
