wayneln
We have a large and growing DokuWiki, 5,000 pages and growing. What is the best way to ensure we have a secure backup of the whole DokuWiki that we can restore if necessary. If we just ftp a copy of the whole site down to a local machine or something, I'm fairly sure we will run into significant difficulties with config and file permission issues if we had to restore. I'd like a very secure way of providing good backup.
We have uploaded the Back-up plugin, which seemed to install okay. However, when we run it, we get an error message 'backup plugin cannot write to the server. This looks like a permissions or config issue, but the data directory and its sub-directories are open to 777, so is there a config setting within the Backup Plugin we need to change?
Can Backup Plugin provide a full system recovery option, or just the dataset?
wayneln
Whoops, I should have read the Backup Plugin install instructions more carefully, having failed to make the Plugin Directory read/write.
Having done that we got farther with a backup via that route, however we are still experiencing errors, depending on which backup file structure we use, all three caused some errors, the best being the GNU Tar fast unfiltered option, which does seem to have created a satisfactory file, however it reported code errors in the process. The PEAR archive library option didn't work at all. GNU Tar filtered option somewhere in between. I am assuming this is something to do with the server setup?
The more I search the DokuWiki info and documentation the more issues and different ways of approaching this I see. Someone, awhile ago admittedly, reported in restoring a full ftp copy to a subdirectory on the same server, the process corrupted all the links in the original instance of DokuWiki, pointing all the links to the newly copied version. Unfortunately the post wasn't answered and I have no idea what process was used, but others seem to report success with the concept of downloading the whole DokuWiki directory and then using that as a restore option.
Right now I see three potential routes for backup and restore:
The Backup Plugin, which creates the backup files, but doesn't have a restore option as such, it is a matter of ftp'ing the files back up to the server.
An ftp download of the data and config directories, but by all accounts if you do this the cache directory can cause problems in doing this.
A full ftp download of the whole DokuWiki directory, which some people says works and others have has problems with as above
I might try and compile the combined wisdom on all this from the forum and documentation and see if I can provide a 'state of play' if that might be helpful
I think if DokuWiki is to have status in a commercial and business sense, a solid backup and restore process is kind of essential, but maybe I have missed the blindingly obvious.
lupo49
Why don't you just tar (with the parameters for keeping timestamps and permissions) the DokuWiki-directory and download it?
wayneln
Yes, the blindingly obvious!!! knew there would be something simple. I guess we were looking for something a little more sophisticated, but actually this would work with the whole DokuWiki directory or just the Data Directory and Config files.
Because we don't have terminal access to the server at the moment, it kind of got overlooked, but we can arrange that. The simple things are always best.
Thanks for pointing us in the right direction.
wayneln
Done and working well, very simple process, using a little batch file, which we will try and automate with a cron job.
Restored the TAR file to a new instance of DokuWiki, no real problems, just needed to adjust the permissions on the local.php directory, which I think is created by the way the server is setup.
Thanks for the hints about this, excellent support for those new with DocuWiki.