Backups
Thu, 2008-01-24 09:14 — mikeybenson
Backing up your Drupal site
Handbook: Backing up
I'm making mine using PHP My admin for the database (there are quite a few settings to screw up) and good o'le elbow-grease for the images and files. Does anyone have any good advice about backups?
I have a second drupal installation on another host that I am hoping to mirror my main site on and make test runs of modules etc. Soon I will try and restore a backed up database to it. I haven't had the time yet.
Any advice would be appreciated.
According to drupal.org...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Whatever works!
We run a cron job to backup the database nightly and other ones to make copies of the backup weekly and monthly. I download and keep the two most recent monthly backups on a local disk.
I backup files, images and custom modules by elbow grease, like you said. If this were really a hassle, or if image and file content changed daily, I'd put them on the same backup schedule as the database.
But most importantly, it was a big confidence booster to actually practice the database restoration (and, document the process, um, yeah). Having two sites to work with should make this fun and easy - if you screw up, you can practice re-installing Drupal.
So far, I've only needed to restore individual tables, and I use a handy shell and perl script combination for this that I found at http://unixnotes.wordpress.com/2006/03/15/restore-single-mysql-table-fro...
Backup module looks interesting
Haven't come across that one before, I'll check it out. At SFU, we have a standard backup schedule for our servers and we also do daily cronned mysqldumps, which come in handy some times, but on my personal sites, which are hosted on a cheap web host, all backups need to be manually done. It will be interesting to see what the backup module can do in that context.
The backup module is great
if you have sufficient access to your server. Many lower end hosting accounts don't allow you ot Drupal sufficient privileges to run the backup module successfully.
If you do have enough privileges, and you are running a single site, the backup module should be all you need. It creates a tarball with your files and MySQL backup, which you can then download.
If you are running several sites on your own server, scripted or managed backups are the way to go.
Cary Gordon
The Cherry Hill Company
Yeah, I just found this out
Looks like my webhost doesn't allow sufficient privs either. I've sent off a support ticket to see if they'll modify the path and some other things prohibiting my use of this module.
Backup Module
I couldn't do the backup module either. I'm not sure why. I don't know all of the details about what it's doing. I like things that I can click though. If I could click rather than have to log in to something manually, I would be happy.
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