Question
How do I backup my Big Medium data?
Answer
If you run Big Medium on a hosted web account, your hosting company
likely keeps regular backups; and since Big Medium stores its data as plain
text, these backups should have no problem backing up Big Medium along
the way.
That said, better safe than sorry. Not all hosting companies are equal,
and some have poor backup strategies or, worse, they say that they’re backing
up your data but come up empty-handed when you need it. It’s not a bad
idea to be a little paranoid and take matters into your own hands.
Starting with Big Medium 2.0.4, Big Medium can make backups for you
automatically according to a regular schedule. Learn how to use this
feature here.
If you're running a version previous to Big Medium 2.0.4, or if you
you would like to make a backup manually, read on.
The data files
The important data files to backup are located in four subdirectories
of your server’s moxiedata directory:
countersdatasearchtemplates_custom
If you want to download the data to your local hard drive, you can just
FTP to the server and download these directories as-is (be sure that your
FTP client is set to “plain text” or “ASCII” mode).
If you have command-line access to the server, you can speed things up
by first compressing these directories into a single file (you can also
ask your hosting company’s tech support team to do this for you).
For Unix servers, the following commands will pack the counters, data,
search and templates_custom directories into a single compressed file
named backup.tar.gz (change /path/to/moxiedata to the actual path of
your server’s moxiedata directory):
cd /path/to/moxiedata
tar -cf - counters data search templates_custom | gzip -c > backup.tar.gz
You can then download this compressed file via FTP (make sure that your
FTP client is set to “binary” mode).
IMPORTANT: If your installation includes large sites (1000+ pages), you
should zip your directories into a single compressed file as described above.
Many FTP servers truncate long lists of pages, and unless you compress the
directories into a single file, your FTP client may not see all of the files
that are needed for a complete backup.
Images and documents
Big Medium stores documents, images and media files in four directories
in the Big Medium page directory of each site.
bm.assetsbm.docbm.pixbm.theme
(In versions prior to Big Medium 2.0.4, the “assets” and “theme” directories
are instead named bm~assets and bm~theme; for installations that were
installed prior to Big Medium 2.0.4, the “doc” and “pix” directories
are named bm~doc and bm~pix.)
It’s possible that not all of these directories will exist in all of your
sites; if any of them are missing from your page directory, that’s OK.
You can download these four directories as-is via FTP (making sure that your
FTP client is set to “binary,” “automatic” or “auto-detect” mode).
Or, as described in the section above, you can first compress the two
directories into a single compact file if you have access to your server’s
command line.
For Unix servers, the following commands will pack all of the bm.
directories into a single compressed file named
documents.tar.gz (change /path/to/html/pagedir to the actual path of the
site’s page directory):
cd /path/to/html/pagedir
tar -cf - bm.assets bm.doc bm.pix bm.theme | gzip -c > documents.tar.gz
You can then download this compressed file via FTP (make sure that your
FTP client is set to “binary” mode).
What about the HTML files?
You can make backups of those, too, if you like, but as long as Big Medium
has its data files, it can always rebuild the HTML files in a matter of
seconds. As long as you have backups of the files described above,
you’ll always be able to restore your Big Medium site in case of a server
crash or other data loss.
