What is Site backup?

A Site backup backs up your site and the user accounts associated with the site.

The site backup is a complete independent backup qualified with all the files integral to your site (site content, configuration information and user data) enabling it to be fully restorable at any time. Since the site configuration information is also backed up, your site can be restored even if it has been deleted or in the event that you want to migrate it to a different WEBppliance server.   

• Note: To restore a backup onto a new WEBppliance server, or if your site has been deleted from the current WEBppliance server, you must contact your service provider and provide him with the necessary site backup to restore the site.

Your service provider can also back up your site but does not have the granularity of backing up the site and user data separately. He can only initiate an integrated backup, wherein the site and user information is collated.

A fully qualified site backup gives you the advantage of functional independence. You can easily migrate your site between WEBppliance servers with the complete assurance of a fully restorable site.

When you back up a site, WEBppliance creates:

• A compressed file, in tgz format, separately for each site

• A compressed file, in tgz format, separately for each user of the site

• Note: The naming convention of a backup file is as follows:
  
  <webppliance_hostname>_<site_name>_<YYYY>_<Month>_<date>_<Hours>_Minutes>.tar.gz
  
  Where:
  <webppliance_hostname> is the name of the WEBppliance server on which your site is hosted
  <site_name> is the name of the site being backed up
  <YYYY>_<Month>_<date>_<Hours>_Minutes> is the time-stamp when the backup was taken.
  
  For example, backing up a site mysite.com on the WEBppliance server mywebppliance.com on Jan 06, 2003 at 11.30 would result in the following backup file:
  
  mywebppliance.com_mysite.com_2003_January_06_11_30.tar.gz
  
  
  When you restore from a backup, each compressed tgz file is listed, allowing you to selectively restore from a backup. For example, you can restore the site and a select number of users to the exclusion of other user backup files.

• Important: DO NOT manually uncompress the tgz file in the archive to make changes and upload them again as a compressed tgz. If the files in the archive have been manually modified, you will be unable to restore files from the archive again. This is a security measure implemented to ensure that the archived files are not corrupted by malicious scripts.

Type of backups

A Site backup backs up:  

• Your site

• All the site users

Site backup

Files backed up for a site are:

• /var/lib/mysql
  
  This directory contains all the MySQL databases for the site.
   

• /var/named/*.*
  
  This directory contains files specific to the site.
   

• Directories that contain customization files local to the site (these will only be restored when the site is restored by your service provider) and site configuration information.

Site user backup

User account information of all the users associated with your site is backed up. Data from the /home/<user name> directory of the particular site is backed up and includes:

• User configuration information

• Files in the site owned by the user