How Should I Backup A Website

fifeclub posted this at 22:36 — 21st December 2004.

Joined: Feb 2001

First of all I have all the origninal php and css and other files for each site stored on my hard drive. Otherwise I occasionally use the Full Backup feature on cPanel and then download the backup.

Well when I moved to a new host, I used the Full Backup FTP to remote server feature for nine different sites on my reseller account (WHM). The new host then used those gzipped backup files to restore 7 of my 9 sites. BUT 2 WERE LOST FOREVER! They told me that the backup files for two of my domains were corrupt. I tried over and over again and it never did work out. I have the original php files but I will have to reinstall any scripts and restore any databases and so forth.

So my question is how else should I backup my sites? I mean if I keep saving corrupted backup files without knowing how useless they may be, it's a waste of my time. Do I need to occasionally restore my backups to a dummy domain just to check it will work if needed? I is confused.

Abhishek Reddy posted this at 02:10 — 22nd December 2004.

He has: 3,348 posts

Joined: Jul 2001

If it was the tarball that was corrupt, the simple way to check is when you download backups, untar them and examine the file tree. If all is intact, you should be good.

If something else is getting corrupt, run a local web server with Apache, MySQL and PHP (hm, do this anyway) and keep a copy of all the sites you manage in it. The content may not have to be up to date all the time but at least you'll preserve the code. Or when you download good backups of the database, you can apply it to your local server copy too, if the content is important.

Busy posted this at 11:08 — 22nd December 2004.

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

if you're going to zip or gzip your database from phpmyadmin, be sure to optimize the rows first other wise this will corupt the zipped file (found this out the hard way)