Automated website backup

Tunney · 16 Jan 2006 at 14:08

At the moment, I've got a blog running WordPress 2.0 on my website. I've set WordPress up to e-mail me a back-up of the mySQL database every day. This then goes to my gmail e-mail account where it's archived. It works well so I'm wondering about how to backup the other files used in my blog via an automated process to a local drive.

What do people recommend? Is there a simple way to schedule an ftp download under Windows? Would compressing and e-mailing an entire website (100-200MB) using a cron job be feasible? Is there any software out there that makes scheduled backups easy?

Cheers!

zetec452 · 16 Jan 2006 at 15:00

What control panel does your webhost run? Most of them will have a backup feature that you can use.

toastyman · 16 Jan 2006 at 15:14

Possibly set up a connection with another computer...say yours at home, and every night, if your computer is on, do the backup via FTP or a similar protocol. If your computer isn't on, send it via email.

Tunney · 16 Jan 2006 at 16:01

Possibly set up a connection with another computer...say yours at home, and every night, if your computer is on, do the backup via FTP or a similar protocol. If your computer isn't on, send it via email.

Is there software that will automate this for me? Something that will sit in the system tray of my home machine perhaps?

toastyman · 16 Jan 2006 at 16:29

Do you have full access to the server and what OS is it running?

Tunney · 16 Jan 2006 at 16:42

I don't think that my access is full, but I've got enough access to set-up cron jobs and use various server-side software over ssh. The server is running Linux.

toastyman · 17 Jan 2006 at 16:21

There are backup tools out there on the internet for backing up Linux to Windows...but you wouldn't be able to use that because your host wouldn't let you install it.

However, you can set it up using PHP...look up on google how php can open an FTP session and transfer files...then you could use a cron job to schedule this every night.

toastyman · 17 Jan 2006 at 16:23

Straight off the PHP site.

PHP:

<?php
// set up basic connection
$conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server);

// login with username and password
$login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user_name, $ftp_user_pass);

// check connection
if ((!$conn_id) || (!$login_result)) {
       echo "FTP connection has failed!";
       echo "Attempted to connect to $ftp_server for user $ftp_user_name";
       exit;
   } else {
       echo "Connected to $ftp_server, for user $ftp_user_name";
   }

// upload the file
$upload = ftp_put($conn_id, $destination_file, $source_file, FTP_BINARY);

// check upload status
if (!$upload) {
       echo "FTP upload has failed!";
   } else {
       echo "Uploaded $source_file to $ftp_server as $destination_file";
   }

// close the FTP stream
ftp_close($conn_id);
?>