Back Up And Running

[moogie]

Well, I'm back up and running as of late yesterday afteernoon. The only minor glitch was that the backups were only through 10/21. A pain, yes, but not a deal killer. I'd been telling myself I needed to learn to do the backups anyway so tack this on to lessons learned.

 

I opened up a trouble ticket this morning just in case and got a detailed response within 30 minutes (WOW!).

 

So now I just need to figure out how to do the backups (I'm sure it's simple). I'm just having trouble getting into cPanel right now so I'll wait a while for things to settle.

 

Thanks to everyone for all of your help.

[TCH-Don]

How to back up your site

[TCH-Bruce]

moogie if you were running Wordpress there is a plugin available to do backups.

[salguod]

If you're using MT 3.1 you can use the Typemover plugin for MT backups, but it hasn't been updated for use with MT 3.2 or newer.

 

But, neither that, or I assume the WP plugin, would backup the rest of your site, only your blog. I have some images up there and some static pages too. The bulk of it is MT, but there are other things.

 

There are older but still valid MT specific backup instructions here and PHPMyAdmin instructions on the MT website here.

 

I do backups via FTP using Filezilla, I'll have to look into the cpanel thing too. Does cpanel just make a big zip file of the contents of the site that I can download via FTP?

[TCH-Bruce]

Does cpanel just make a big zip file of the contents of the site that I can download via FTP?

Yes it does. There are two ways to do it. One is as Don describes which is to do a home backup and then the databases. The other is to do a full backup which gets everything in your web space including databases. One thing to remember with a full backup is one of the techs needs to restore it for you.

[moogie]

Yes it does. There are two ways to do it. One is as Don describes which is to do a home backup and then the databases. The other is to do a full backup which gets everything in your web space including databases. One thing to remember with a full backup is one of the techs needs to restore it for you.

 

Bruce,

 

In your opinion, what is the best way to do it. I did mine as Don suggested, through cPanel but it took a while. I just have my blog up on this site (that and my photoblog). Do you think it is better to do a full back up?

[TCH-Don]

The home directory backup has all of your folders and files including any email on the server.

When you download it, you can pull out files or folders from the compressed backup file

to upload later by them selves.

 

The databases can be restored by you any time

good if you are going to upgrade a forum.

Backup the database and the files in case you need to restore all to the before condition.

 

Be aware the full back up is very large and is created in your root folder.

You must download it and then delete from the server if you are low on space.

Later you must upload the full backup to your root folder and contact tech support to have them restore it.

 

In my opinion the home directory give me more options and takes less time to down load.

The databases are compressed and take little time to download.

 

There are scripts such as AutoMySQLBackup from SourceForge that can email you a backup of your database,

great if you run an active forum or CMS.

 

I get an email every morning of my databases.

There is an option for automatically selecting all databases

># List of DBNAMES for Daily/Weekly Backup e.g. "DB1 DB2 DB3"
DBNAMES="all"

So you are covered when you add a new database.

 

Hope this helps.

[TCH-Bruce]

In your opinion, what is the best way to do it. I did mine as Don suggested, through cPanel but it took a while. I just have my blog up on this site (that and my photoblog). Do you think it is better to do a full back up?

Since you asked my opinion I will tell you.

 

If you have a static site (html pages) any time you make changes you should make a backup of your site. I myself prefer to use the full backup method. Yes it takes a tech to restore it but nine out ten times you aren't going to need the backup. But that one time you need it, you will have it.

 

For a site that is database driven, you only need to take a backup of the full site if you make any template or other static part changes but you should backup your database every day.