Preparing for backup and restore

Before you back up or restore data, review the preparatory information required and the tips recommended to ensure successful backup and restore operations. Further, an informed backup plan helps you recover from operational adversities with minimal turn-around.

# Before you begin

Before you begin, verify that you meet the specified requirements and have the requisite information to backup and restore data.

- At least one of the FTP servers recommended by Ensim

- The host name or IP address of the FTP server on which you want to backup and restore data

- Your FTP login user name and password

- Optional: The complete directory path on the FTP server

- Optional: Maximum size of the file being backed up or restored

- Note: Various file systems and FTP server utilities have limits on the file size they can handle. If the size of your file exceeds the file management capacity of the file system or the FTP server utility on your server, the file is split into multiple files before continuing with the backup or restore operation.

- Sufficient disk space on the target server to accommodate the data, otherwise the operation will fail.

# Tips for successful backup and restore

Review the tips provided in this section to pre-empt certain backup and restore issues.

1. Schedule or perform backups during a period of low activity.

2. Restoring Web sites that reference specified Site IDs (hard-coded) onto a different server renders the site inaccessible. Do not hard-code Site IDs in Web content. Use environment variables provided by control panel.

   Environment variables enable scripts to use up-to-date information without having to store that information themselves.

   In addition to the standard environment variables, the following three environment variables are available to all scripts on your site:

   - SITE_ROOT. The root path of your site

   - SITE_CGIROOT. The top level CGI path of your site

   - SITE_HTMLROOT. The top level HTML CGI path of your site

   It is recommended that content developers use these variables to avoid hard-coding Site IDs. This ensures that path names are always correct, even if those path names change.

3. The backup and restore operation fails on certain FTP servers. Ensim recommends the use of certain FTP servers for successful backup and restore operations.

4. Files backed up on WEBppliance 3.0 or 3.1 are incompatible with later versions. Perform a FULL backup of these files on the latest version of the control panel after you upgrade from the older versions.

5. Backing up data using FTP does not change the permissions of uploaded backup archives. If you want these archives to be secure, you must modify the default FTP permissions as needed.