Easy Backup & Restore a must!!

  • OK, so I’m a novice to all this online stuff.
    I have a website, it has some forums which has a few hundred registered people and a fair few active ones.
    It has a Blog, running WordPress 1.2 of course.
    It also has other bits and pieces – it is my corner of cyberspace and I’m happy enough with it.
    A little while ago I had the need to change who hosts my website.
    I was having extended downtime and although my website is by no means “that popular” it was getting annoying.
    Moving my site wasn’t a major issue – I use FrontPage 2003, so I simply moved site and then uploaded everything again.
    Soon my site was working, with the exception of my Forums (running on phpBB) and Blog (WordPress 1.2).
    I must admit I was worried on both fronts, both are free pieces of software – surely moving was not going to be easy.
    Lets take phpBB and by using the built-in tools I was able to do the following:
    Enter Administration
    Click “Backup Databse” and a few seconds later I was downloading a file that was in GZIP format.
    I soon had 3mb .sql file which was apparently compressed.
    At my new hosts I installed phpBB (which I’ve always found quite easy) into the same sub directory as before.
    Entered my totally empty forums, went to administration and clicked “Restore Database”
    It asked me to browse to my backup, I sent the .sql file back still in GZIP format.
    Within five minutes my forums were back, all my users were there, all my posts were there it was as if I’d never moved.
    There seems to be nothing built-in to WordPress to allow me to do the same.
    There seems to be some kind of “hack” that I can install which adds the facility to download my Blog however that is seven files and I don’t know what to do with them once I have them.
    I did read through the readme files and some online direction, but I’ll be honest, I’m impatient and I also started getting nowhere.
    In the end I ended up installing WordPress 1.0, upgrading it to WordPress 1.2 and the manually re-typing all my Blog entries for the 2 months I’d been writing it.
    My Blog is now 8 months old and I’m scared.
    Scared that I’m not taking adequate backup’s and scared that I couldn’t move to another host if I wanted as I wouldn’t know how to move my Blog.
    I don’t know how far 1.3 or the next version is away from “release” but it needs something as simple as the phpBB backup & restore function built in.
    I need to be able to click a single button and have a single file downloaded.
    I then need to be able to reinstall WordPress and upload that single file and find everything back to normal.
    Sorry if such a feature has already been discussed – it’s late ??

Viewing 9 replies - 16 through 24 (of 24 total)
  • pericat

    (@pericat)

    % mysqldump [database name] --user=[username] --password=[password] > [backup filename]

    You should be able to open your backup file in a text editor. What’s there is not only your data, but all the commands needed to re-insert it exactly as it was into an empty database, table names and all.

    paperlion

    (@paperlion)

    pericat; not sure what point you’re making.

    pericat

    (@pericat)

    you asked:
    “Aren’t there parameters to be specified when doing a backup through either command-line mySQL…”

    The command I quoted is basically it, if you want to dump your database to a file from the command line.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    The WordPress One-Click Backup plugin is now compatible with WP v1.5:
    https://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2005/01/28/wordpress-one-click-backup-version-13/

    paperlion

    (@paperlion)

    Aha, Pericat – I got it. thanx.

    I tried a conversion of a sql dump file using Notepad++ and couldn’t get it to work. I think it was because a lot of the posts had been pasted in from other programs and encodings though.

    I think there’s a way to specify UTF-8 on the sql dump command though also, which should eliminate the text-editor step of converting it all back.
    I think it uses the iconv utility which someone just pointed out to me here:

    ‘https://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/07/18/converting-mysql-database-contents-to-utf-8/’

    iconv -f iso-8859-15 -t utf8 wordpress.sql > wordpress-iconv.sql

    However, I’m not sure of the syntax, especially where the file being imported has unknown or mixed encoding schemes.

    pericat

    (@pericat)

    I am for sure missing something– why would you want to convert the dump file if its purpose is to be a backup? Isn’t how it comes out the same form in which it needs to go back in?

    I can see doing this if the data is in the wrong format to begin with, but once it is correct, you ought to be able to dump/restore without any intervening steps.

    paperlion

    (@paperlion)

    If you open a 1-Click Backup html file, for instance, (and probably a phpmyadmin sql text file too), you’ll notice in the commented header, that the encoding is ISO-something [8879?]. WordPress by default is UTF-8 though.

    From what I understand, mySQL doesn’t support UTF-8 (or other Unicode) well, less so in the past, and not by default. Thus, the encoding is changed during a backup.

    Restores will also remain in the non-unicode scheme, since 1) the same mySQL is used to do the restore, and 2) WP encoding settings only work for new posts, not restored ones or those in the database prior to an encoding change.

    That’s the way I understand it, and I believe it is what’s caused a lot of posts to look garbled after being restored from either a phpmyadmin or a 1-Click Backup restore (which I believe are essentially the same thing).

    Most users probably won’t notice a difference, but many of my posts were pasted from emails – much of these from various foreign sources with a few different encodings. Not sure why they pasted okay into WP, but they sure didn’t backup well. Trying to change the encoding in the actual backup files didn’t work too well either (yet?). Seems the encoding modifications being done during backup routines are causing the problem though in getting it to look the same as before the backups.

    This topic comes up a lot so here is some new information.

    There is now a new plugin to backup your database to your server, your computer or via email. You can read more about it https://asymptomatic.net/wp/2005/07/22/1775/wp-database-backup-v15/
    and download it https://redalt.com/downloads/
    It’s called the WordPress Database Backup Plugin.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    And, more information on WordPress backups can be found here: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/WordPress_Backups

Viewing 9 replies - 16 through 24 (of 24 total)
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