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Backups/Archiving

Keeping backups on hand is crucial to maintaining any website. While your data is protected from hardware failure by the OCF's backup infrastructure, you will find you need a backup history of your own when you need to:

  • Migrate to an upgraded website
  • Archive an old website with historical data
  • Regress to a previous state due to a bug
  • Recover from a security breach

You can make easy-to-restore backups over SSH by following the examples on this page. You could alternatively use SFTP, but this wouldn't allow you to back up a database.

Backing up a web directory​

Making a backup of your website document tree (where all the .html, .php, etc. files are) is as simple as making a copy of your files into your home folder. If you maintain multiple websites, you can make individual backups of each; otherwise, you can just back up public_html.

To save on storage space, you should archive and compress these backups as either .zip or .tar.gz files. If you have a folder ~/backups created, you can save your website ~/public_html there with the following command:

tar czhf ~/backups/backup.tar.gz ~/public_html

To restore the backup, you would first remove the contents of ~/public_html (i.e. rm -r ~/public_html) and then extract the compressed file.

cd ~/public_html
tar xzhf ~/backups/backup.tar.gz

WARNING​

Do not try to backup your public_html folder by copying it directly! It is not a real directory, but a link to where the files are actually stored. Instead, explicitly copy all the files inside to another directory or use the the commands on this page which were written to do so.

Backing up a database​

For many websites and frameworks, the web document tree only makes up half the site; the rest of the data resides in the database. Particularly, if you are using WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, you will have to backup your database alongside your web directory.

MySQL​

If you are using a MySQL database, you can use mysqldump to make snapshots. Instructions are on the MySQL page, but the basic syntax to make a backup is

mysqldump username > ~/backup.sql

and, to restore, is

mysql -D username < ~/backup.sql

You should compress these files with gzip as they can be quite large. The above commands can be modified to do this. To save,

mysqldump username | gzip -c > ~/backup.sql.gz

and, to restore,

gzip -dc ~/backup.sql.gz | mysql -D username

Using .my.cnf​

By default, you have to enter your MySQL every time you make a backup, which is inconvenient. Worse, if you forget the password and uses makemysql to reset it, it will break your old website backups! If you want to save the trouble, follow our instructions to create ~/.my.cnf which will allow you to use MySQL without entering the password by hand.

Taking down a site​

If you have an old website you want to archive and remove from public view, you can make a backup of it using the above instructions and then delete your webiste files and database. When deleting files, be sure to delete the contents inside of public_html and not just public_html itself, which is a mere link.

The easiest way to remove the contents of your database is to log into phpMyAdmin at https://pma.ocf.berkeley.edu with your OCF username and MySQL password. There, you can select all tables using the check boxes and select Drop to delete them all.

If you instead wanted to delete the whole database, you could use the command

mysqladmin -uusername -p drop username

However, you would need to run makemysql to create a new database, which would permanently change your password.

Example backup​

Suppose your OCF account name is johndoe and you have WordPress installed directly in ~/public_html. A typical backup might look like this:

johndoe@tsunami:~$ mysqldump johndoe | gzip -c > ~/mysql-backup-7-26-15.sql.gz
Enter password:
johndoe@tsunami:~$ tar czhf ~/site-backup-7-26-15.tar.gz -C ~/ public_html

while a restore would look like this:

johndoe@tsunami:~$ gzip -dc ~/mysql-backup-7-26-15.sql.gz | mysql -D johndoe
Enter password:
johndoe@tsunami:~$ tar xzhf ~/site-backup-7-26-15.tar.gz -C ~/ public_html

If you were using .my.cnf, you wouldn't even have to enter your database password.

Security​

The only real security concern is that you don't leave any backup files in your public_html directory. Doing so would allow anybody to download all your raw data and e.g. steal your website login information and find and exploit other security vulnerabilities.