Greetings,

 

I have setup Uniform Server and MediaWiki on a Windows XP Professional machine. Everything seems to be running smoothly.

 

Before I begin adding significant content to the system, I want to devise a backup strategy to prevent data loss in the advent of a system failure.

 

In experimenting thus far, it appears I can simply backup the entire Uniform Server folder and restore this folder to another machine in the event of a failure. In a test, the wiki seems to work correctly on the new machine after this folder is restored.

 

Is there any problem with doing this? Will I encounter difficulties if I tried to copy this folder while the system was undergoing use (files in use and such)? I notice there is also the program phpMyBackupPro built into Uniform Server. I was able to produce backups of the mySQL database, but in backing up this system, I would want to preserve other configuration files that are not part of the database. Is there a particular reason or strategy behind backing up the database by itself (easier to perform frequent backups, restore, etc)?

 

Any insight anyone can provide into setting up an effective and efficient backup strategy for this type of system would be greatly appreciated

The best way to backup the system is to copy the whole Server directory and paste it in a Backup Directory or something.... If anything goes wrong, then restore the whole thing... no need to do anything since all configurations and so on where also backed up. It's the fastest, safest and best method.

 

Everything should be ok even if the server is still being in use, but make sure there are no commands being entered into the database like mysql... or no files being chnaged or the backup will only have the old copy and not the one with the new things entered.

Thank you very much for the feedback my friend.

 

Backing the system up in the manner you suggest sounds like it will work great

It should