Backup and reset in educational context

[brendonhatcher]

Hi.

I want to use Node-RED within a Code Club context to teach IoT etc.
I have a number of activities with associated resources, including flows stored on each Raspberry Pi.
Participants will update the flows during the activities, and may decide to export and overwrite my flows.

I need ways to do the following:

1. Update the flows on the Raspberry Pis from a repository - I may update a flow and want to push it out to all devices, or may want to reset participant changes back to the default when I start teaching a new group.
2. I would like participants to be able to export and save their custom projects, ideally in a shared cloud space, rather than on local.

What are my options?

Thanks
Brendon

[dynamicdave]

I will be interested to hear what responses you get as I tutor an after school club two afternoons a week.
We have two towers of 6 Raspberry Pi-Zero-Ws that each class of 12 students use.
At the moment we make extensive use of Node-RED's 'project' facility to keep each day's work separated.

Raspberry Pi-Zero-W Mini-Tower

Just finished building a couple of mini-towers for my IoT Club. The idea is the towers can be kept in a cupboard at school and just brought out when I run the IoT Club. All I would need to do is plug the 6-port PSU into the mains and switch-on the Club's WiFi router. Should save a lot of time as previously I had to cobble together a number of Raspberry Pi(es),of various vintages, and then at the end of the session take the whole lot apart!!! [wifi_1_small] [wifi_3_small] [wifi_2_small] Tues…

[TotallyInformation]

• Projects have been mentioned by Dave already - not my favourite personally

• GitHub repo clone/pull is possible even without Projects though my view is that it is more bother than it is worth unless you cannot get SSH access easily to all of the devices.

• Simple backup/restore scripts would probably be my go-to. You almost certainly already have at least SSH if not SAMBA access to all devices and some way to mount cloud access. It is pretty easy to do, robust and easy enough to automate.

  For the cloud backups, I would probably back up student work to a secured central Pi or server first and then from there back up to cloud. If for no other reason than to ensure I didn't loose control of the cloud storage to an overly ambitious student!

[brendonhatcher]

I realised that Node-RED is not the only data set that I needed to backup, as I am also running InfluxDB and Grafana (and more to come).

I therefore decided that a full SD card image backup is the most scalable, comprehensive way to backup everything. I am using https://raspibackup.linux-tips-and-tricks.de/en/home/