Automate Your Business

Archive for May, 2009

Jason, the creator of the Caffeinated Content plugin, is offering a 30% discount on the plugin, for 1 week (starting yesterday) or 250 copies, whichever comes first. The coupon code is MAYFLOWERS, so if you’ve not got it, here’s where to go

The last one in our series of backup problems is not one that can be resolved by the backup script.

I had backups scheduled. They were running. They were FTPing to my own home PC as well as a local copy on the hosting company’s server.

Sweet.

Once a week or so, I’d log in and check that they were still running. Yes, there they were, all the accounts backed up, with the latest backup for each domain showing as being completed within the last 24 hours.

Then there was a problem – the kernel on my VPS had not been updated, a parked domain had been hacked and used in a Paypal scam, and the host insisted on rebuilding the VPS so that there were no “backdoors” left by the hacker.

“Not a problem,” said I. “Please go ahead.”

… wait…

“Er, Mr Peacock,” said support. “Our backups are corrupt.”

“That’s OK,” I said. “Here’s a copy I’ve got on my own PC.”

“Er, Mr Peacock,” said support. “Your backups are corrupt as well.”

“Oh *~$!,” I said.

Luckily, I had the source code for the websites in my working folders on my PC, but I lost the data from the databases.

So… the moral for today is to every-so-often, take a fresh backup (in the Cpanel Auto Domain Backup script, just hit “Run” next to the relevant domain). Then create a hosting accout ON A SEPARATE HOST, with the same account username, and restore that backup. You should still be able to access the account using a URL like this:

http://www.host.com/~accountusername

(but check with your host if this is exactly right). It should pretty much be a copy of the live site. You might find some issues where an application is trying to access the proper domain name, and it doesn’t like the temporary name above, but as least you’ll then know that the backup itself is OK.

Hope that helps.