Cultivating tangible change
The American Institute of Architects
The American Institute of Architects’ Communities by Design initiative works to create healthy, secure, and sustainable communities. One of its focuses is disaster relief, and it provides resources and support to architects who help rebuild areas affected by disasters.
AIA Communities by Design approached us to transform their disaster preparedness program from a print manual to a dynamic toolset that could easily be used before, during, and after a disaster. Using a suite of open source tools, including Drupal, we created a system that runs on a USB drive and can run on almost any laptop. With this USB drive, architects responding to a disaster can access the toolset even when there is no internet or electricity (well, at least until their laptop battery runs out).
But we didn’t just put an electronic manual on a thumb drive – we built a dynamic website on a USB drive so that content can change and grow over time. Relief workers can add local content to the drive, and once they connect to the internet, that content is loaded to the system and all other connected USB drives. This year the AIA Communities by Design initiative will give out these toolsets with the latest local information about disasters and the best available disaster relief materials, all in a medium that still works when a disaster hits.
Drupal on a stick, design, website development, strategy
Work
Drupal on a stick, design, website development, strategy
Strategy Focus
Database Backups for Drupal on a Stick
How We Got Back Ups and Restores Working in an On a Stick Environment
How We Got Back Ups and Restores Working in an On a Stick Environment
As we talked about here and here, we recently built a dynamic disaster relief kit in the form of a Drupal website on a usb thumb drive for the American Institute of Architects’ Communities by Design initiative. Users are able to add and edit content in the kit, so we wanted to make it possible for users to create a backup of the Drupal on a Stick database and, when necessary, restore the database from one of the available backups.
Here's how it looks:
This sounds simple enough, and in fact there are some useful options out there for running backups when operating a Drupal installation in normal environments (e.g. LAMP on a hosted server). However, the constraints of running in an "on a stick" environment meant we needed a custom solution. Why? To begin with large numbers of writes and reads from the flash drive take quite a long time. Also, we wanted to avoid the classic situation of creating a snake that eats its own tail - we didn't want to attempt to fully restore a Drupal database from within Drupal itself.