Revo: What's your favorite backup method?

Hi,

I’m very new to Modx and recently I’ve been looking for better ways to back up my Modx revolution site. So far I’ve been backing up the files via FTP and the database with PHPMyAdmin but it feels like a really clunky way to do it. I’m curious to hear how other users are doing it.

Thanks!

Lee

Using: MODx Revolution 2.0.0-pl rev7212 (still not confident enough about the backup process to upgrade haha!)

Great suggestion! My host does at least offer really easy, albeit manual, backup via their cpanel.

My other sites don’t need backing up so often though... I originally installed modx via softaculous, and i notice they have a backup function as well. It just gives a one click zip file to download, very convenient but it’s not clear how to restore if needed.

The old BkupMODx module works fine for Revo in stand-alone mode (run as a separate php file, not embedded as a module). It could be run from Revo as a CMP, but one line that points to the config.inc.php file would need to be changed.

My hosting account comes with daily offsite backup.
And when I upgrade I backup the DB using phpMyAdmin
and ZIP the files (after cleaning the cache, logs, etc.)
right in the cPanel filemanager.

I have 3 scripts:

One that zips up the entire html directory.
Another that dumps the database
And another that sends this all off to Amazon S3 for offsite storage.

I can give you an SVN link to download them:
http://code.google.com/p/fireproofsocks-utils/source/checkout

I don’t recommend relying on your hosting provider for backups. Somewhere, they will have a little bit of fine print that says that their backups are not guaranteed. I got majorly burned by that with VPS.net, and their handling of the situation was so poor that I have no regrets in completely flaming them. DO NOT USE VPS.NET as a hosting provider!

Everett,
so you backup daily?

is this just your account or do you host other peoples accounts?

Can the average host honestly guarentee its backup service? Imagine the potential liability! I like the aws idea, if your data generates income, you cant afford to rely on a single backup.

Your provider should offer daily backups (preferably stored longer than just a day; we keep them for at least 7 days). But you shouldn’t rely on just that; providers come and go. And when they are gone, their daily backups are worth nothing to you! So you should always store a recent backup offsite!

I also have a script to zip up all files/dirs, as well as one to dump the database, but at the moment manually copy them to an S3 account.

Everett - that automatic backup to S3 sounds awesome. Is there anyway of making that script available in a non-SVN format?! Version control via SVN or git is on my to-do list, but at the moment I just don’t have the time to sit down and work through some tutorials.

Thanks

The aws script is a free Perl script: http://timkay.com/aws/

My backup scripts are here:
http://fireproofsocks.com/backup_scripts.zip

But that’s an older version... thus the SVN link.

Yeah, a host is never going to take on the responsibility of guaranteeing backups, so you have to sort of do that yourself... yes, I backup daily. I do host some of my clients’ sites... some clients I backup every hour (at least the db).