What's the canonical process for backing up a website?
- by Walkerneo
This is going to sound terrible, but bear with me. I currently have a cron job that does a mysql dump, a git add all and commit, and a git push to bitbucket. I set this up almost a year ago, when I didn't know much about git, backups, and general web development and administration. I haven't had the time to fix this and do it properly, but the repo has now grown quite big from accumulating large temporary files from my forum, so now I have to do something and I want to do it properly this time around.
What processes do semi-large websites and personal site admins use for backing up server content?
Based on what I've learned since I set this up, what I'm currently think of doing is:
Making changes on a development domain and committing the code frequently
Archiving the entire site after a successful deployment from the development domain
Having automatic daily database and user-content backups.
I still like the idea of backing up sqldumps with git, though. I know git isn't a backup tool and that this is beyond its purpose, but the textual queries that are exported would be easily managed by git and would save a lot of space in archives.
