??How do you encrypt & save to webspace??

[Spark]

I need to get into the habit of backing up properly - The thought of finally getting somewhere (in my case, not very far) and having to start all over because I've made yet another silly mistake fills me with dread. Luckily, following earlier advice, I've started printing out the html files before I attempt to do anything with them at all and saving copies under different names. Reading recent postings - Jonty's idea of saving an additional copy on the webserver makes a lot of sense too:

"I encrypt and upload mine to a subdirectory beneath the www folder with a completely random name eg asd79hJL0P which no-one will ever be able to guess and then password protect the folder using .htaccess - should anyone be able to find it, un-encrypt and download it then fair play to them as it is NEVER going to happen" Posted by Jonty - 26th Aug.

Only trouble is - don't know how to do any of that??? How do you encrypt and upload a file?? Do you need special encryption software or can even the likes of me manage it?

Thanks

[wjcampbe]

Sonia - do you have winzip? This has encryption abilities and using that you can copy the entire contents of site1 folder, then use your ftp program to upload.

You also need to be able to make a folder on your website password protected and use a couple of lines in robots.txt to keep the good web spiders from trying to access the folder.

In robots text add two (new?) lines
user-agent: *
Disallow: /yourfoldername

[Spark]

Hi Bill

Thank you - yes I do have Winzip - I'll give it a go. Could I just ask another question on the back of your reply - my site went live yesterday on it's own domain name and having just looked at the stats for yesterday there are a few things I'm not too sure about - one in the robots.txt files you mentioned.

What is the robots.txt file - I can work out that it's where robots & spiders crawl the site but how do they access it (my stats are showing that it's been accessed already) - is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Also, they show that different cgi-bin's have been accessed - are they supposed to be? Sorry to ask silly questions - I'm just fascinated by pages that have been hit that I didn't even know I had.

Thanks again for making it easy to understand.

Sonia

[jont]

Most (not all) search engines when they find your site will look for the robots.txt file - as Bill says you can restrict the way they trawl through your site by restricting various sections - best to do a search on the internet as there are many tutorials on how to set them up.

Actinic navigation sends links via the cgi-bin which is normal but not great for search engines - there are many threads on here regarding this issue. Make sure you have a link from the homepage (preferably all pages) to the sitemap.html page which is automatically created by Actinic and is in the acatalog folder on the web site. But yes it is normal to see cgi-bin access.

As for the OP and encryption - I would create a random name folder (beneath the www folder of possible) eg Yt78HG8P7 and also rename your zip file to a random name rather than backup.zip eg Gh78.zzz and rename the extension if you need to download again. May also be worth putting a index.html page into the backup folder to also prevent a directory listing - the index.html page can just be a blank page or a redirect back to the main homepage.

Be aware that creating a snapshot does not pick up all the files in the site root folder - this should not be a problem if you have not manually modified any of the .pl scripts - but it may be worth taking a copy of the site folder "as is" and storing on a CD

[Spark]

Thanks for that Jonty - I'll take a look at robot restricting. Can the robots only view the files or do they have the ability to change / alter anything?

[wjcampbe]

The robots view and copy the files and SHOULD NOT change anything. (BTW you really want to see robots on your site - these are how search engines like Google get their data).

Only restrict robots from places you don't want them to go - there is no need to tell them to go to certain places - they will all go everywhere they can, and some will ignore robots.txt and try to go places they should not.

[Spark]

Thanks Bill.