Backup and restore overview

Backup is a process that replicates data from your active business servers to a different or remote server. Regular or periodic backups provide insurance against loss or destruction of data.

Why you need to back up data

For an online business, data is currency. Loss of data can prove expensive in terms of money, time, and effort required to replace it. It is therefore important to preempt contingency situations or events that can compromise availability, by keeping a backup of your content on a secure server.

Data can become corrupted or inaccessible due to various reasons:

• Application or system corruption. An application or system locks up or freezes

• Data file corruption. Data appears garbled or unreadable

• Hardware failure. A hard disk malfunctions

• Intentional damage. Damage to data caused by hackers or viruses

• Natural disasters. Damage caused by fires or other catastrophes

A regular or periodic backup takes the crisis away from such contingencies and enables you to recover with minimal turn-around.

What you need to back up

You need to back up your site and all the user accounts associated with the site. It is recommended that you evaluate the criticality of each data entity on an operational scale and plan your backups.

Back up:

• Site data

Files pertaining to your site and the user accounts associated with the site are backed up.

• User data

User configuration information and files owned by the site user are backed up.

• Note: If you back up the site and user files into the same backup directory, selecting necessary files when you want to restore is daunting, as during restore, all the backed up files are simply listed without clear demarcation as to the type of backup each compressed file belongs to.
  
  It is strongly recommended that you back them up separately in different backup directories, to quickly identify the files you want to restore.
  For example, you could back up the site files to a site_backup directory and back up users to a user_backup directory, instead of backing them all up in one common directory, say, my_backup.

Backup type

When you invoke a backup, WEBppliance takes a full backup of your files. A full backup backs up all files irrespective of whether the file has changed or not since the last backup. This is in contrast to an incremental backup where only files that have been modified since the last backup are backed up. WEBppliance currently does not support incremental backups. A full backup demands considerable time and disk space.

Backup format

Backups are created in tar format (a format that combines several files into one) or as a compressed .tgz file (a UNIX compression format). A .tgz compressed backup reduces the file size to approximately 30 percent of the original file size and thus improves on the time and disk space required to take backups.

Restoring data

The process of retrieving data from a backup or archive is called restore. To restore the files, the system uploads the specified files from the backup server to your working directories. You must have FTP access to restore files.

• Important: If a file by the same name, as the one being restored, exists on your server, then WEBppliance does not replace or overwrite the existing file, in other words, the file is not restored from the backup.

What you can do using the Backup and Restore option