Sharing time: my current backup solution

Thought I’d share an update if anybody is interested.

It’s important for us to keep a local backup, for a number of reasons. Perhaps a client makes a change that removes content, perhaps there is a bug that removes content, maybe we just want to archive the old version of a site.

I use a combination of 2 pieces of software:

  1. Web2Disk which is a front end web scraper that can be scheduled. Good for capturing module data. Even has login option (which I haven’t tested yet).

  2. GoodSync allows scheduled FTP backups.

  3. Dropbox Pro for 180 day version history. Plus is also possible as it has a 30 day version history and it’s a bit cheaper.

Note this is a PC solution. It looks like web2disk is PC only software, but there may be something comprable for Mac. GoodSync and Dropbox are cross platform of course.

There is a cost. GoodSync is ~$50USD one time, Web2Disk is ~$40USD one time, and Dropbox pro is ~$15 per month ongoing. For us Dropbox wasn’t an extra cost as we were using it already.

The setup is basically that you setup each site in GoodSync and Web2Disk to download at your frequency into a Dropbox synced folder. I don’t add dates to the folders, I just over-write them and let Dropbox do the versioning. We have a desktop machine that isn’t freqently used to run these on a weekly basis. One caveat is that GoodSync scheduler will only run on a Windows local account, but it was easy to setup a local account and install GoodSync there. The local account doesn’t need to be logged in for it to run on a schedule. I space out my downloads throughout low traffic times so as not to load up any of the servers. It’s only one entire site download anyway so it shouldn’t be that heavy.

Web2Disk basically creates a working local version of any website. It’s pretty impressive. Even JS and libraries. If nothing else it’s great to capture a working version of a site for reference.

One additional thing I do is that when I launch a new site I date a export of all the modules on a site, including page/folder. That way I have easy templates for importing data.

I’ve already had this save me a couple of time. It’s great piece of mind knowing that I’ve got a backup of all my sites.

Hope this helps.

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