Backup Sob Stories

  • July 23-30, 2005, will be WordPress Backup Week here in the forum and on the WordPress Codex. Support Volunteers will be helping users backup their WordPress site and databases on a variety of operating systems and server software platforms, and encouraging everyone to backup your software, even if it isn’t WordPress.

    To get started, we’re inviting everyone to share their backup sob stories. If you don’t have one, we recommend you read these, because these sob stories may be in your future and we all can learn from the woes of others to protect ourselves from such suffering.

    So share your backup woes and sob stories here and tell us what you learned from the suffering, and how you will NOT endure the pain and agony of lost data every again…or at least, how the pain won’t be quite as bad next time.

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  • Tarball is the colloqualism applied to archives created using the UNIX tar command. tar stands for tape archive, and was the tool originally used to write data to magnetic tapes. It works for writing to files on the disk just as well, and is now mostly used to bundle a bunch of files into one.

    There is a compress command, but it’s not often used. My guess is that bluegator was describing what he did with his tarballs, as opposed to an actual command. Most tar implementations now support gzip and bzip2 compression, so you can concatenate and compress all your files with one command:

    gzip compressed tarball:
    tar zcvf /path/to/tarball.tar.gz /home/skippy/*

    bzip2 compressed tarball:
    tar jcvf /path/to/tarball.tar.bz2 /home/skippy/*

    Yea, sorry about that..

    the commands in the bash script are pretty much identical to those that skippy described.

    Since I host multiple applications on the server (Gallery, Gallery2, WordPress, Mambo, PhpMyAdmin, etc) I try to backup some of the Large apps seperately (like, just my wordpress directories), and then backup everything else (admin and stats applications) into one big tarball.

    While the SQL dump does backup some unneeded info, the automation of everything helps me out quite a bit. Eventually I plan to get a network storage drive and have automated backups to that, but my son has slowly eaten away at my monthly budget, so for now this solution will have to do.

Viewing 2 replies - 16 through 17 (of 17 total)
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