Back up disaster!!

[david_kay]

My hard drive has just crashed and, like the genius I am, I had not done a back up. Is there ANY way I can recover my site from the files I've uploaded to the my web server, or am I about to have to set the whole lot up again? The site is up and live and doing fine but of course is now totally on it's own, I haven't even re-installed Catalog yet.

I REALLY hope there is a way of doing this....

[jont]

You can recover the finished HTML pages from the site but not the raw info / templates required by Actinic

Hard drive crashes can often have data recovered using either software (limited) or specialist data recovery experts.

Not being able to recover the original templates etc from the finished site is probably a bonus to help prevent theft of other peoples work of modified templates and layouts etc

[mjohn]

Is it the drive thats faulty or the operating system corrupted?.

You might have just enough life left in the drive to set it up as a second hard disc on another machine and using that machines operating system get at the files.

I have done this numerous times and its suprising how drives that fail to boot up because of damaged discs can be accessed as slaves from another machine, worth a try. Also works if the OS is trashed, though the recovery option should work here.

MJ

[dave_finlayson]

As an add on to this it would really help a lot of people if Actinic uploaded original template files, scripts etc to another folder on the web server.

Perhaps one you could name yourself and therefore protect?

Can this be added to the wishlist

Dave

[david_kay]

I'm ashamed to say I've formatted the disc so I can't see anything being left on there. I have a two disc set up and on my slave disk I have Linux. I was playing around with a Linux formating tool, thought I was cleaning up the Linux hard drive, but instead...

The only good thing to come from this is I've learnt the value of regular back ups. when I start to trade properly (in fact I got my very first order two days ago, at almost the very same moment I wiped my store to oblivion - oh, the irony!) I will simply not be able to get away with not doing regular backups. I guess you can only learn from your own mistakes, but anyone reading this who hasn't backed up their store recently, try to imagine how you'd feel if your hundreds of hours of work went up in smoke. It's grim

I would second what dave_finlayson suggested, how do you go about adding things to the wish list?

[dave_finlayson]

Actually thinking about it you could add all your template files, and whatever else you want, to Advanced | Additional Files. However they would be available for the world (if they knew they were there)

Dave

[wjcampbe]

Dave already had the partial answer in his post.

You can create a protected drive on your server and copy your snapshot up there for safety. That is part of my weekly backup routine.

Daily - snapshot
Daily - copy contents of site 1 to second folder on same machine
Daily - copy contents of site 1 to external hard drive
Weekly - Zip up weeks snapshots and copy weekly zip to external drive and Website directory.
Monthly - write all backups to DVD.

If I were Actinic I would not try adding this functionality to the programme - there are too many variables in where/how a user might want to handle a backup.

It really is up to every computer user to develop and maintain their own backup schedule - and stick to it. There are good scheduling tools out there you can use to automate the backup tasks or at least show an on screen message to remind you, and there is also a 'tasks' item in outlook express??

[jont]

As an add on to this it would really help a lot of people if Actinic uploaded original template files, scripts etc to another folder on the web server.

Perhaps one you could name yourself and therefore protect?

Can this be added to the wishlist

Dave

You can do this manually obviously by FTP'ing the templates to the site. The main issue there would be site security and people possibly being able to download templates you may have spent hours developing and tweaking (or paid good money for someone else to design them) and someone else popping by and grabbing a copy.

I personally upload an encrypted ACD file nightly to a non-guessable folder above the site root and also take a CD copy for each days ACD on a weekly basis

[jont]

If I were Actinic I would not try adding this functionality to the programme - there are too many variables in where/how a user might want to handle a backup.

Have to second Bill comments - this will just add another 100 or so threads with people getting errors during template backup for which there are already steps in place to create back ups, restore from the original folder etc.

[dave_finlayson]

I would agree with you both completely. I have more backups than I know what to do with and run a batch file every night copying the site to 2 seperate locations.

However, I would imagine there are a lot of novice users who are not aware you cannot simply download your site to get it up and running again. Expecting templates files to be stored on the web server would not seem unreasonable to these people I suspect.

Perhaps better documentation about why a backup is so important is one option?

Dave

[david_kay]

I am actually lucky in that I was just using a stock layout from Catalog, I hadn't had any templates designed so rebuilding the site won't be a mammoth effort - I can download all my product images from the ftp server so I won't have hours of scanning to repeat and with the site being live I can copy all of the text and paste it back into my new site.

On this subject, is there documentation on restoring from backups in the event of a disaster?

[jont]

Perhaps better documentation about why a backup is so important is one option?

Thats a fair point - maybe the nag screen when you try and exit Actinic could be extended to highlight the importance of taking a regular back up

[BaldrickUK]

Dave already had the partial answer in his post.
Daily - snapshot
Daily - copy contents of site 1 to second folder on same machine
Daily - copy contents of site 1 to external hard drive
Weekly - Zip up weeks snapshots and copy weekly zip to external drive and Website directory.
Monthly - write all backups to DVD.

For those of you who think this is OTT (over the top) I think Bill probably does it just about right, including keeping backups on a web server or "Externally"

How many of you have a Digital camera and have collected hundreds of shots of your loved ones, and they all sit on one hard drive just waiting for a virus or worse still fire. This is why keeping a backup away from your PC is very important. The disk sat next to your burning PC will burn as well.

I know fires are rare nowadays, but you get my point. Incidentally I am the worlds worst at backups it takes a real effort to do it, but do it you must.

[david_kay]

I will certainly be doing them regularly from now on!
If I can, can I just quickly clarify this situation - the site i'm building is not using any themes, it's just a plain old vanilla theme. I can see all my images and html pages and cgi scripts on my ftp server - can I restore these to my reinstalled copy of Catalog, or am I going to have to rebuild my whole site again from scratch? Sorry to labour the point here, I've just been reading back through this thread and I'm not 100% that this can be solved quickly or if I#m just going to have to start again from scratch.

[wjcampbe]

You can copy the images using ftp from the website to your site1 directory. You can rebuild your navigation by creating your sections and subsections in the same order, using the same page names. You can cut and paste your text from the web pages into your fragments and product descriptions. The difficulty comes in getting each bit added in the right place to generate the same result.

If you use the same 'vanilla' theme then when you regenerate a "preview in local browser" you should get exactly the same content.

Do you have the 'security' information somewhere in hard copy? And the detailed setup for your PSP? Your network settings?

The important thing would be to avoid uploading your rebuild to the web until you do have everything rebuilt.

Actinic will regenerate the scripts etc, so you don't need to worry about those *unless* you did have some changes to the standard scripts.