Will your backups work if you have to restore them?

For 2023 - we are now fully retired from IT training.
We have made many, many friends over 25 years of teaching about Python, Tcl, Perl, PHP, Lua, Java, C and C++ - and MySQL, Linux and Solaris/SunOS too. Our training notes are now very much out of date, but due to upward compatability most of our examples remain operational and even relevant ad you are welcome to make us if them "as seen" and at your own risk.

Lisa and I (Graham) now live in what was our training centre in Melksham - happy to meet with former delegates here - but do check ahead before coming round. We are far from inactive - rather, enjoying the times that we are retired but still healthy enough in mind and body to be active!

I am also active in many other area and still look after a lot of web sites - you can find an index ((here))

There are a lot of myths surrounding data backups. Ones says that "the more often you take backup everything, the better it is", but actually that only applies to data that's changing. There is little point in wasting a lot of resources repeatedly backing up the same unchanging builds in /usr/local if you're in a stable web server environment where you web site content and MySQL databases are the critical data, with configuration files such as .htaccess being used for any minor tweaks the server needs on a per-directory basis.

But using a carefully structured backup strategy could lead to you missing out one critical element, so it's best to check out that your backups are good. How to do this?

Yesterday, I had an eight hour airline flight ... and I had with me a Linux / Fedora laptop and a "complete" set of structured backups from which a restore / rebuild of our web site should be possible. What better opportunity to spend a couple of hours (a.k.a. one battery laptop lifetime) checking that my backups really did work?

I'm pleased to report success; in the time I had, I stripped out delegate's builds of Apache httpd, PHP and MySQL from /usr/local, installed a fresh set using the distributions I had with me as part of the backups, restored the specific config files and then the websites including HTML, CGI, Database and ancillary directories from my backups. And (apart from accessing data from other servers such as the European Central Bank - not available in-flight!) it all worked.

A few more pictures

I wasn't the only one working in flight ...

An evening flight, the low sunlight over the wing ...

... and as we flew into the night, cities lay out below us.

(written 2008-09-18, updated 2008-09-22)

Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles

A162 - Web Application Deployment - Backups and File System Management
  [153] Linux - where to put swap space - (2004-12-16)
  [334] Symbolic links and hard links - (2005-06-02)
  [554] What backup is adequate? - (2006-01-04)
  [593] Finding where the disc space has gone - (2006-02-06)
  [703] Copying files and preserving ownership - (2006-04-28)
  [735] Boys will be boys, saved by Ubuntu - (2006-05-27)
  [754] tar, jar, war, ear, sar files - (2006-06-10)
  [1013] Copy multiple files - confusing error message from cp - (2006-12-30)
  [1023] Finding public writeable things on your linux file system - (2007-01-06)
  [1288] Linux run states, shell special commands, and directory structures - (2007-08-03)
  [1439] Linux / Unix - layout of operating system files - (2007-11-20)
  [1648] The tourists guide to Linux - (2008-05-20)
  [1765] Dialects of English and Unix - (2008-08-21)
  [1893] Some Linux and Unix tips - (2008-11-18)
  [2299] How much space does my directory take - Linux - (2009-07-20)
  [4056] An overpractical test of our backup strategy! - (2013-03-30)
  [4063] Backups by crossover between network centres - setting up automatic scp transfers - (2013-04-13)
  [4115] More or less back - what happened to our server the other day - (2013-06-14)
  [4390] Checking MySQL database backups have worked (not failed) - (2015-01-10)
  [4400] Commenting out an echo killed my bash backup script - (2015-01-19)
  [4405] Backup procedures - via backup server - (2015-01-24)
  [4481] Extracting data from backups to restore selected rows from MySQL tables - (2015-05-01)

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Some other Articles

Carlisle High School - Class of 1973 Reunion
Colvin and Carlisle
FTP passive mode - a sometimes cure for upload hangs
Motorcycles welcome at Well House Manor
Will your backups work if you have to restore them?
Spiders Web
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What does an browser understand? What does an HTML document contain?
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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