If you’re using FogBugz On Demand, we’re already regularly backing up your database. However, we do occasionally bring the system down for periodic maintenance, and one of our customers wanted to know how they could maintain a local copy of their important FogBugz data just in case our services were unavailable. They didn’t necessarily want the database itself, but just a way to look at case data in a pinch.
While we never plan downtime during your productive work hours, we can empathize with always wanting a local copy—just in case—in order to stay productive (for your source code, we of course offer a distributed version control solution, which promises exactly that).
To solve this problem, we added a simple script called ‘Backup FogBugz’ to the recipes section of the FogBugz XML API Development wiki. It checks FogBugz for unread cases, then saves the updated case info to a local HTML file. It doesn’t save everything—you wouldn’t be able to e.g. restore FogBugz with this data—but it does give you a relatively fresh copy of the data on your local machine.
Here’s a quick video overview of how it works: