Question

How to backup all the data files in twiki including attachments

Environment

-- NilupaBatawala - 27 Dec 2005

Answer

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I do not believe there is a complete solution for this offered on TWiki currently. Some time ago, I put together my own solution for backing up my TWiki installations on hosted sites and partially packaged it up as an AddOn. However, because I really didn't know what I was doing when I put it together (even though it worked well enough to meet my needs), I was hoping to get some feedback and help in "polishing it up" before posting here on TWiki.org. As things go, that never really happened and so my working notes are still in rough form here. However, since this is about as close to a solution as I've found, I offer it to you in hopes that it's useful. If you do use it, perhaps you can give some suggestions for improving it.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 27 Dec 2005

If you have a standard TWiki installation you simply backup the whole twiki/* tree.

If the TWiki directories are in different locations:

• twiki/bin : Backup after TWiki upgrade or configuration change
• twiki/lib : Backup after TWiki upgrade or configuration change
• twiki/templates : Backup after TWiki upgrade or configuration change
• twiki/data : Backup regularily
• twiki/pub : Backup regularily

Use any existing backup tool, even cp -pr is fine.

-- PeterThoeny - 27 Dec 2005

e.g. BackupUsingUnison

-- MartinCleaver - 28 Dec 2005

What about Twiki running on VMware? If we backup the whole virtual machine when nobody uses Twiki, without shutting it down will it cause any problems? I tried it and both the running Twiki as well as the copied vm worked normally but i am afraid that maybe i haven't done all the necessary tests.

-- FrancoisSiaholevas - 2011-07-01

Backing up a running VM is pretty safe. You could also create first a snapshot, then backup the snapshot. Instead of backing up the whole VM you could backup just the twiki directory in regular intervals.

-- PeterThoeny - 2011-07-02