The 'XenForo Backup' Discussion

[Floris]

Okay, let's put our heads together, there are a lot of people out there with no shell access, with no control panel and only a CLI, and there are people on shared hosting and all the way up to dedicated servers.

How do we recommend the various people to make back ups on a frequent basis?

If possible, get a VPS or Dedicated solution, so you can SSH in, and use PHP or Bash from the CLI, and guarantee a complete and full backup. And make a crontab to run it daily, and another crontab 2 hours later to copy a backup to a remote offsite location.

Since I run multiple databases on my server, I tend to use a script that dumps all the databases; http://thegeekdistrict.com/topic/1522-all-mysql-database-backup-shell-script/

However, this doesn't cover the /home/* directories.

 

[Mikey]

I have been intending to use the mysql backup script you posted there for a while, just never got around to it.

I think that for the /home/* dirs with the files, it's a BIG task. I recently backed up my VPS's /home/ folder, and the tar was 5+GBs, thats a big big download for most people, and to have that stored on your filesystem would just be impractical..

 

[Onimua]

On top of this, could we provide a reminder plugin (should be easy) to backup the site? Perhaps it could have a setting the user can change to remind them once every day/2 days/3 days/week/2 weeks/monthly?

If there's a thread link to share with people, the reminder could also link to the steps they should take. Not sure of this idea though. :oops:

 

[imported_Brian]

I think that for the /home/* dirs with the files, it's a BIG task. I recently backed up my VPS's /home/ folder, and the tar was 5+GBs, thats a big big download for most people, and to have that stored on your filesystem would just be impractical..

Assuming you mean file backups? I use ipswitch for FTP and it has a sync utility that I run nightly. I have one folder that constantly gets new files from user uploads. Up to about 8 gigs and since the sync utility only downloads new files it's very efficient.

 

[Simone_imported]

The database can be quite easy by using the example link above. I personally use a cron with the following command.

mysqldump --opt -Q -u USERNAME --password="YOURPASSWORD" DATABASENAME > /SERVER/PATH/TO/STORE/backup.sql

I am just wondering if we can create the same method for the HOME directory?

Do we really need the whole Home or just the data and internal data folders as that is where the attachments and avatars are stored?

 

[imported_Brian]

On my server we have a secure remote ftp space created by our Provider. We then setup cronjobs to dump our database, compress it and ftp it over daily. We also compress our website files and back them up daily as well.

We keep a running 7 day backup on our ISP backup server, and then we do one monthly backup to our system at home.

It has definitely come in handy a few times that I had to resort back to an previous version of a script, or when our server got hacked last year, etc.

If I was to make any improvements, it would be to automate a weekly backup as well that rolls every 4 weeks. So we'd have 7 days of backups, and then 4 weekly backups, and the monthly backups at my house.

That would be ideal for us. But I just haven't had the time to finish it! My famous last words! :x)

 

[Hescominsoon]

Okay, let's put our heads together, there are a lot of people out there with no shell access, with no control panel and only a CLI, and there are people on shared hosting and all the way up to dedicated servers.

How do we recommend the various people to make back ups on a frequent basis?

If possible, get a VPS or Dedicated solution, so you can SSH in, and use PHP or Bash from the CLI, and guarantee a complete and full backup. And make a crontab to run it daily, and another crontab 2 hours later to copy a backup to a remote offsite location.

Since I run multiple databases on my server, I tend to use a script that dumps all the databases; http://thegeekdistrict.com/topic/1522-all-mysql-database-backup-shell-script/

However, this doesn't cover the /home/* directories.

For any machine that i can install software on I use virtualmin. It's free and works very very well. If you want some more advanced features the pricing is quite reasonable for the pro version and upgrading from free to pro is easy. With virtualmin you can backup the entire virtual server..all of the databases, settings, emails inside email boxes, etc etc..gzip/bzip them..and store them locally or ftp/ssh to a remote file server on a schedule you dictate.

 

[phonegnome]

I use bqbackup on my server(s), it just backs up the whole server using rsync (so only changed files are moved) - this allows you to save processing time and bandwidth, but also means you get a fully automated backup which is 100% safe, of everything you have.

 

[Hescominsoon]

Virt also does incremental backups as well..

 

[Mikey]

Is there a cron script I can run which does backups on xenforo's side? (so not using the server, but actually with xenforo, sort of like mybb?)