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Hi, I'm Joshua Hatfield, Solutions Engineer at Rackspace and a contributor to the Joomla
community. Today I am going to talk to you about backing up your Joomla site. Joomla
is your CMS your content management system and it's very important to back this up.
You're not going to understand the importance of backing up your site unless your application
or website has gone down. If you have ever experienced your website down time, uh...loss
of business, loss of revenue and you haven't had the ability to restore this in a timely
fashion, then you understand. But, those of you that haven't experienced it yet, this
is going to help you mitigate the risks by backing up your site and we are also going
to tell you how to restore it. Now, it comes down to what to back- up. Joomla
itself is a dynamic CMS. It contains two things. It contains your web files and folders and
then it also contains your database. We need to back-up these two components and we need
to be able to back them up off the server in order to successfully have them off site
and then restore them at a later time in the event of a catastrophic disaster.
How to back-up your Joomla site. You can manually do this yourself with scripts, you can go
ahead and copy your web files and folders, and then dump them in MySQL database, and
then FTP everything off or download everything off to your own environment or to another
server environment or infrastructure. The main thing is you go ahead and mitigate the
risk by getting it outside the environment and infrastructure that even if there was
a catastrophic disaster at your data center, you still have the ability to get your business
up and running. I currently use Akeeba Backup. Akeeba Backup, formerly known as Joomla Pack,
allows me to automate and script everything out. I can set up weekly back-ups, um...daily
back-ups if I want to and it backs it up to a JPA file for me. It basically takes everything
and runs a script that I don't have to do, I just check it.
So now that we have our back-up, we need to go ahead and test our restore. Don't just
assume Akeeba Backup is running and everything is working fine. You want to go ahead and
restore your JPA file or whatever the file is that you get. To restore it, you want to
restore it to another solution. Don't overwrite your current application. So, restore it to
another server. When you are stored to another server, just run the JPA file by installing
a default Joomla installation or go to Akeeba Backup for further information on how to restore.
If you happen to have your files and folders and MySQl, go ahead and copy those on over,
test it out with the same user name and password, and make sure everything is running. The key
point is, test your back-ups, test your restores and in the event of a catastrophic disaster,
we want to help you get up and running and we can't do so without those things.
Again, my name is Joshua Hatfield, Solutions Engineer at Rackspace and if you have any
questions, feel free to give us a call.