How to backup a Camino website

Introduction

This article provides a guide and steps on how to backup a Camino powered website. To be able to perform a backup, you will require FTP access to your Camino website and database management access.

Why Backup?

You should always keeps a recent backup of your site. This applies irrespective of whether your hosting company performs backups.

Backups are not just about handling accidents and emergencies. There are other reasons apart from accidents where having backups are useful. There are many ways data may be lost or damaged beyond recovery including security breaches, failed upgrades and even incorrect configuration settings. Keeping backups enables your administrators to revert your site to a working state

It is good idea to practice both backup and restore. If you have already run through restoring from a backup you will have the skills and knowledgebase should it be necessary in an emergency. Performing a test restore will also verify the integrity of your backups. A corrupt or empty backup is just as useless as no backup.

It also good practice to create backups prior to installing, upgrading or uninstalling Camino modules.

Summary

There are two parts to a complete backup of your Camino site.

1. The Camino database
2. The files and folders on your website

Database Backup (Backup Part 1 of 2)

To avoid potential problems, it is recommended that you close your site to the public during backup by taking it offline. For most small Camino sites, this step may be skipped.

There are a number of options available for backing up the Camino database and their availability may differ between hosting providers.

Database Access Details

For most options, you will need to know the details of the database server, the name of the Camino database and the username and password required to access the server. If you don't have the details to hand, do the following:

1. Connect to your Camino site using FTP
2. Browse to the /user/config folder and download the connectionstrings.config file
3. Inside the connectionstring.config file there will be an XML entry called db_connection. This contains the required settings
   1. ?Server = The address of the database server
      1. ?If this is set to 127.0.0.1 or localhost, then the database server has the same address as your Camino site.
   2. Database = The name of your Camino site's database
   3. Uid = Username
   4. Pwd = Password

Important: The database details above should always be stored securely. Also, it may not be possible to connect to the database remotely using the above values if the username is linked to a specific host address.

Using phpMyAdmin

If your hosting provider offers phpMyAdmin:

1. Log into phpMyAdmin
2. Click on the name of your Camino database from the left-hand list of databases
3. At the top of the page, click on the Export tab
4. Select the backup options you desire and then click on the Go button.

Backing Up Remotely

It is possible to backup the database remotely using 3rd party tools like SqlYog or HeidiSQL provided you have a MySQL user account with remote access permissions.

For Camino sites hosted by Calzada Media, please see Backing Up & Restoring MySQL databases

File System Backup (Backup Part 1 of 2)

Your Camino files and folders may be backed up by downloading them with an FTP program like FileZilla. Once connected by FTP, download all files and folders for your website.

To restore files and folders, you use the same FTP program to upload.

For Camino sites hosted by Calzada Media, please see Uploading Files (FTP) for articles on connecting and download files using FTP.

Once all files and folders have been downloaded, change your site to be online.

Storing Backups

Once you have created backups, you should store them in a secure and resilient location accessible by only those that require access.

If your hosting servers are in the same location as your staff, you should store the backups in a different location. If not, a fire, theft, water or any other damage may destroy both the live site and the backups.