Keeping an installation tidy

#What it does

• Removes demo sandboxes once they expire, with the files they hold.
• Takes an hourly sample for the status history.
• Clears out spent handovers, used password reset links, sign-in records older than ninety days, and share links that expired long ago.
• Sends a reminder thirty days before a licence expires, to the licence contact and to us.

Nothing here is destructive to your work: studies, plans, machines and reports are never touched.

#Backups

Once a night the task writes a single archive holding a complete SQL dump of every table and every uploaded plan, mark and picture. The most recent are kept — fourteen by default — and older ones removed. Release packages are left out: they can be downloaded again.

Platform → Installations lists them with their size and a download button, and says when the newest is older than two days. If a night's backup fails you are emailed once, and the card stays marked until it succeeds again.

#An off-site copy

A backup on the same server as the data it protects is only half a backup. Auddomate can copy each nightly archive to any S3-compatible bucket — Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, MinIO — with a few lines in the installation's configuration. The Backups card on Platform → Installations then shows when the last copy went and to which bucket, offers Copy the latest backup now, and the scheduled task emails the platform contact if a copy fails while the local backup succeeded.

#What it watches

The same task keeps an eye on the things you would otherwise find out about from a customer: a status check that starts failing, a licensed installation that has not checked in for three days, and a subscription whose payment did not go through. Each one sends a short email to the platform address once, and not again until it clears or a sensible interval has passed.

#Setting it up

Open Platform → Installations. The Scheduled task card shows a private address and whether the task has run recently. Point your host's scheduler at that address every five minutes. On cPanel that is Cron Jobs, with a command such as curl -s "https://your.domain/cron?key=…" >/dev/null; the minute field takes */5.

The task only does what is due, so calling it more often than needed costs nothing. If it has not run within the hour the card says so, which is the quickest way to notice a scheduler that has stopped.