Backup and Restore Procedures

[mplex]

Hi everyone, I recently introduced dotproject at our managers meeting, and everyone can't wait to use it, but there is one issue I am worried about. How do I properly backup dotproject on a unix machine so I could recover from a catastrophic failure or database corruption? This may be somewhat of a mysql problem too, but I want to know how everyone else backs up the site. I found some mysql database files in /var/lib/mysql/dotproject/, but is this the entire database? I don't want to do a complete backup of the entire machine, but I do need to know how to backup AND restore the site if everything was lost. Thanks for your help.

-- Jonathan Yantis (College of Charleston)

[gourley]

I use the mysqldump command (part of the MySQL distribution, wherever you put that) to dump the database out each night to an ASCII SQL file that can be run to restore the database completely. This is done each night right before our regular system backup which then writes the SQL file to tape. I also run the MySQL isamchk program periodically to check against corruption. See the MySQL docs for details.

[mplex]

Thanks, I will look in to this, and it seems like exactly what I was looking for.

[Horace]

There is also a backup module in the dotmods section. Not automated but quick and easy.

[mplex]

I saw the backup module and I now have it installed, but there was one more question I had. How about file attachments? I saw that they were in ./dotproject/files in a strange format, and I assume I need to back that up to. Is there anything else that someone can think of? I am going to try to do a test restore next week, because the information we are storing on the site is absolutely critical. Thanks

[Horace]

the files seem to be renamed to a 'random' number for use by dp but are otherwise intact. you should be able to do a regular backup on the dir and be ok, but test, re-test and test again
you probably know this already, you could do a regular backup on a live db/open files if your backup software supports it. this would seem to make the most sense as you could have var/www and var/lib/mysql stuff one tape.
dont forget your conf/ini files :)