If you are not familiar with Drupal, its one of the best Content Management Systems around. Its rock solid performance keeps even the biggest and most complex websites running without a problem. It makes amazingly simple to create and update websites, both start ups and complex. Most web hosting services like Go Daddy now offer Drupal as a preferred CMS (Content Management System) solution. This article explains how to backup and restore an existing Drupal website.
| There are essentially two parts to backing up and restoring Drupal. The first part involves backing up the Drupal database, which contains all your content and the second part consists of backing up your website structure. The website structure includes your image files, static pages and other directory structure in your website. In this article, first we will do a step by step demo on how to backup Drupal, then we will show how to backup the website directory structure. The last part of the article will explain how to restore the website from scratch or just do a partial restore. We will be using a very easy method of backing up and restoring the website, using Drupal's "Backup and Migrate module". So lets get started !
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- Download the Backup and Migrate module from http://drupal.org/project/modules?filters=drupal_core%3A78&text=backup
- The module will come in a .tar.gz file , extract the archive file to a temporary directory, eg C:\Temp\backup_migrate-5.x-1.2
- Using FTP copy the C:\Temp\backup_migrate-5.x-1.2\backup_migrate folder to your /sites/all/modules directory on your Drupal installation
- Log on to your Drupal site as an administrator
- Go to your website at /admin/build/modules and enable the Backup_and_restore module
- Now go to /admin/content/backup_migrate and configure the module, normally all the default settings work. I usually prefer to "download" the backed up file rather than saving it to a directory online. The default option date and timestampts the backup filename.
- In addition to backing up your database using the module, you would also need to backup all the files. This can be done simply by using your FTP client and downloading all your website files.
- If your site is hosted on a Linux or Unix server and you have SSH or shell access, you can backup your site files by giving a "tar -cjvf [archive file] [source directory]" command (without quotes). So for example if your Drupal installation is in the /web directory, the command would be "tar -cjvf drupalwebsitebackup.tar.bz2 ./web" , then you can simply download this backup file to your computer for safe keeping
- To uncompress the file, you can use the command "tar -xjf drupalwebsitebackup.tar.bz2"
- You can go to the "Backup schedules" tab and setup a backup schedule and configure how many backups to keep. You would still need to backup your other site files using FTP and/or SSH. You can automate a FTP process using a batch file and scheduling the batch file to run using Windows task scheduler
- If you need to restore a website, you would first need to restore the website files only if they got corrupted or deleted, then you would restore your database by going to the restore / import database tab. Note that it is highly recommended that you try this on a non production site first.
Very Simple and Most Useful