Backup Strategy?

JRSweets · Worker Joined: Aug 06, 2004 Posts: 192

I would like to get some peoples point of view on a backup strategy. How often should I back up the db? Should I regularly back up all the files on the site as well?

Are there any tools available to automate these task?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

beetraham · Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2004 8:39 am

Quote:

I would like to get some peoples point of view on a backup strategy.

How often should I back up the db?

Talking about dynamically evolving databases - ideally, every and each change to the database would be nice to get captured in form of backed-up snapshots. However this is far from reality - depending on the risk analysis, i.e. how great is a value of the accumulated data, you might find yourself backing up your mYSQL databases (1) per day (as a nightly performed back-ups).

Most web hosts offer BACKUP services (1) week without a cost, but as some don't, I'd say it's beneficial to get started with it oneself. My MySQL back-up's experience is limited to ENSIM environment, but it offers a solid basis for implying a fact that most web server management Tools incorporate at some level a possibility to back-up those databases via automized approach.

Please consult your ISP - he should be proficient enough to point out the needed actions for these purposes.

Quote:

Should I regularly back up all the files on the site as well?

As the nature of statically characterized files is exactly what the concept itself is suggesting, you should not have a need to back-up the *hard coded* files at your web server, unless the static content of those files has been changed/altered. At least to me, this is a guideline in which I solely rely - it may take days, before a file has been changed at some sites.

Quote:

Are there any tools available to automate these task?

I'd say that the most easiest way to perform a backup of your webserver's *hard coded files*, is to head down to the web server root folder and issue a following command (I'm making an assumption that you're hosted on a LINUX server);

(1) Moving down to "root folder" of your name based site

> cd $YOUR-WWW-ROOT-FOLDER

(2) creating a compressed tarball out of all contents (of root folder and all the contents below the root folder)

> tar cfz yourfilename.tar.gz *

Please note that you need to necessarily equip the tarball with *tar.gz* suffix, always - otherwise the Tools used for extracting the tarball at some later phase will not be capable of extracting/identifying the *entity* as a compressed format package (though it can be renamed still to proper format afterwards).

Now, should you ever find yourself in a situation that *hardcoded* entities need to be restored (for example due to physical crash of a disk), then you'd extract the backup as follows;

> cd $YOUR-WWW-ROOT-FOLDER

> tar xvfz yourfilename.tar.gz

The above will extract the package content as-is - so if there are any files that should NOT get overwritten at the extraction target folder, then beware - the operation is irreversible, as LINUX server contains no-such thing as a *Trash folder* from which you could retrive the once destroyed data.

BR,

-beetraham