Backup and restore overview
Backup is a process that replicates data from your active business servers to a different or remote server. Regular or periodic backups provide insurance against loss or destruction of data.
For an online business, data is currency. Loss of data can prove expensive in terms of money, time, and effort required to replace it. It is therefore important to preempt contingency situations or events that can compromise availability, by keeping a backup of your content on a secure server.
Data can become corrupted or inaccessible due to various reasons:
Application or system corruption - Your application or system locks up or freezes.
Data file corruption - Data appears garbled and illegible
Hardware failure - Your hard disk malfunctions
Intentional damage - Damage to data caused by hackers or viruses
Natural disasters - damage caused by fires or other natural and unnatural catastrophes
A regular or periodic backup takes the crisis away from such contingencies and enables you to recover with minimal turn-around.
Before backing up, it is recommended that you evaluate the criticality of each data entity in your WEBppliance on an operational scale and plan your backups.
Back up:
Reseller data
Site data
When you invoke a backup, WEBppliance takes a full backup of your files. A full backup backs up all files irrespective of whether the file has changed or not since the last backup. This is in contrast to an incremental backup where only files that have been modified since the last backup are backed up. WEBppliance currently does not support incremental backups. A full backup demands considerable time and disk space.
Backups are created in tar format (a format that combines several files into one) or as a compressed .tgz file (a UNIX compression format). A .tgz compressed backup reduces the file size to approximately 30% of the original file size and thus improves on the time and disk space required to complete a backup.
The process of retrieving data from a backup or archive is called restore. To restore the files, the system uploads the specified files from the backup server to the working directories on your WEBppliance. You must have FTP access to restore files.
Important: When you restore a file, ensure that no file by the same name (as the file being restored) exists on your server, else the restore will fail.
Using the Backup/Restore section of the control panel, you can:
Back up data
Restore a backup
Schedule a backup