Website Backup Utility

This tool provides a convenient method for extracting backup copies of your software, files, and data from your installation of ExSite. It fetches backups of your "middleware" layer, ie. your web code, documents, and data. It does not back up lower-level server files such as your Apache, MySQL, Perl libraries, or filesystems.

There are three backup types:

  1. Documents (backup will contain an archive of your HTML documents folders)
  2. Software (backup will return an archive of your CGI executables folders. This will include plugins and configuration files.)
  3. Database (backup will contain a dump of your database tables.)

You may also have the option of gzip or zip compression.

The minimum complete backup will be your your database plus your software. Most HTML documents can be reconstructed from that by publishing, and auxiliary plug-in files can be obtained from software distributions. Documents backups may nevertheless be useful to snapshot the actual live content. They are also important if you have web documents that are not archived in the CMS revision control system, or custom plug-ins that are not in public distros.

Backups will be downloaded to your PC. A default backup name (with the current date) is provided, but you may change it. It is up to you to store or save the backup files in a reliable way. Writing them to CD or DVD and storing them in a secure place is a good idea.

This tool makes use of the following archiving tools on the server: gzip + tar, or zip. If these tools have not been installed on the server, this utility may fail to generate useful backups.

WARNING: Backups can be very large, and take a long time to download, espcially on a slow connection.

Restoring from Backups

First, consult the installation documentation that came with your system, or consult the documentation at http://support.exsitewebware.com, to understand where files belong.

The following commands give examples of usage. Consult the documentation for these commands to understand what changes you should make in your situation.

Restoring the documents

# cd $HOME
# tar xzf website-documents-backup.tgz

or

# cd $HOME
# unzip website-documents-backup.zip

Restoring the software

# cd $HOME
# tar xzf website-software-backup.tgz

or

# cd $HOME
# unzip website-software-backup.zip

Restoring the database

# gunzip website-database-backup.sql.gz
# mysql -u USER -h SERVER_IP -p DATABASE_NAME < website-database-backup.sql