Finally, A Tool to Backup a Website and its MySQL Database

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

I have been searching for a convenient method of backing completely backing up this website, files, database and all. This is important because sites can and do get hacked, or experience hardware failure which results in lost data. All the hard work put into a site can be lost in a flash if a backup is not available. Web-hosts do not necessarily make or guarantee backups, which is why making ones own backups is necessary.

Yesterday, I found a product that can backup everything in one go. It is called SiteVault, and it conveniently backs up both the main website files and MySQL database in one go. The most important features are listed below.

Backup From FTP

SiteVault can backup the contents of an FTP site. Since FTP is typically used as the administrative backend to a website, this is a convenient method of backing up the website files. Some would argue that this could be achieved via a simple FTP client. However, SiteVault performs an incremental backup, thus only copying files that are new or modified. This saves a lot of bandwidth when compared to a simple copy. Most backup software assumes that the backup is being stored on the FTP server, not that it is the FTP account that must be backed up. 

Backup the MySQL Database

The other half of this website is its MySQL database. In some ways this is the more important part, since the actual content is stored here. There are plenty of tools that could be used in order to backup a MySQL database, but it is more convenient to have this performed by the same program that backs up the rest of the site. Thay way both backups are synchronized. 

Scheduled Website Backup

As with any good backup program, backups can be scheduled to occur periodically. Thus, the task of making backups is completely automatic. Naturally, a backup operation can be performed at any time too.

Obtaining SiteVault

SiteVault can be purchased from its website. At present (8 January 2009), it costs $19 US for the lite version, to backup one site, and $99 for unlimited sites. The $19 US lite version is perfect for someone with a single site, and is very reasonable. A trial version can be downloaded from the SiteVault website.

In my opinion this is a tool that is well worth paying for, and I have not found any other program that performs the same task to my satisfaction. If a website is hacked, or hardware fails, having a backup makes the difference between getting the website back up and running, and losing it for good.

Comments (1) | 7 January 2009