Daily Forum Backups

[Craig]

The following is information on the backup schedule in place here at Windows Forum.

During each scheduled operation, the forum database is backed up, as well as a complete file and directory listing of the entire site.

The process currently takes approximately 3 minutes to complete, during which time the forum may slow down.

Backups are scheduled daily every two hours starting midnight 00:00 GMT.

These backups are then downloaded to various locations for safe keeping.

Regards

Craig

[Craig]

Currently, the forum database that houses all forum information, topics, posts, polls, configuration information etc is backed up within 30 seconds. Their is no possible way to do incremental backups on the database, and as a full backup only takes 30 seconds, their is no need too.

The webmail database is backed up within 2 seconds.

In both cases above, the outcome of the backup produces a file ready for download. Currently the forum database is around 130MB, and takes around 10 mins to download on a 4MB connection.

After the databases are backed up, a site backup is started.

Currently, the whole site is backed up, which is all files and directories visible via the World Wide Web (this also includes the just created database backups). Again, one large file is available for download, but at a whopping 700MB, it is a little large, so this then gets compressed to around 400MB.

When I go to the private backup area of this site, I get a choice of downloads:

Forum Database

Webmail Database

Site Backup (inc the above)

I will look into creating incremental backups for the site, as I can narrow down folders that have files changed on a regular basis.

With regards to what I do with the data I have backed up, the most recent versions are always available on the website ready for fast and easy access for a quick and simple restore (and if need be, the files can be transferred across the web to another server at a faster speed than anyone can download / upload). Again, the most recent versions of the forum and webmail databases are downloaded to my computer when they are available, and once a week a copy is sent to my external hard drive for safe keeping.

As the site backup is quite large, I will only download this every three days or so, and then transfer the most recent version on my computer to the backup drive then I do my weekly transfer. The data contained within the site back is non-crucial for the site running, (for example only has uploaded images), and so this can be easily recovered. In the worst case scenario, 3 days worth of uploaded images would be lost, but can be re-uploaded by members.

So that’s about it!