Disk Space

[trying hard]

All the shared hosting plans provide so much disk space per plan. Do we still need to have our own back up of our data or to have an external hard drive?

[dave]

Customers are responsible for their own backups. It is always good to make sure that you have your data readily available no matter who your hosting provider is.

[cenin]

I would rather have a backup and not need it than need it and not have it. I learned the hard way once already and even if you are not computer savvy using cPanel is pretty easy to setup backups. Just make sure you remember to download them after they have emailed and completed.

[linker]

With this explanation, how often should we have a backup then? Do you think it's a good idea to save the previous backups or overwriting them is alright to save space?

[FrankSpencer]

It would depend how often your information changes. I had a forum at one time with a thousand plus members active, and it took forever to back up. But since it was non-essential stuff I just did it once a week to save effort.

A more essential place I had, I did daily.

[dave]

Also keep in mind that on a website like a forum you normally just need a daily Database dump and a weekly full copy. Usually files on a forum dont change unless someone uploads a picture or files.

For instance we dump a copy of our member center database every hour, even though our sites are very big the SQL data is only a few megabytes.

[annamae]

I have always preferred to keep backups on external hard drives when it comes to personal financial information.  I would assume it would be equally important to backup any files needed to run your online business.

[linker]

Dave, can you please clarify the difference between a dump from a backup? How do you make a dump? I'm curious on doing it because you said you can dump using only megabytes of space.

I agree that doing a backup is very tedious and takes up a lot of space. So if this dump serves the same purpose as a backup then this would be the better option in saving data.

[dave]

There are several ways.

1. You can download your sql database directly from cPanel.
2. You can log into cPanel then phpmyadmin and do a dump from there.
3. You can download the database dump from within most software in the admin panel.

We also have some customers that process financial transactions that have setup a plan with us where we dump their database to a directory on the server every hour and they use software on their side to come pick it up. We charge a few dollars a month for that but it's worth it fro the customers that we have using it.

[annamae]

If I am understanding correctly, a dump is of just a few files whereas a backup would include all files?  If that is the case, a dump would not serve the same purpose as a backup.

[abender]

To add another inquiry on top of annamae's question, how much disk space will a dump use compare to a normal backup? Can we also program cPanel automatically to dump our database in a regular basis just like what you are doing with your servers?

[dave]

A dump is the SQL database only. Not the files that make up the application. Basically it's the Data portion of most php applications.

The size is directly relational to the size of the database.

[FrankSpencer]

So then the dump is the most essential part of the backup-I mean application data isn't needed on such a regular basis is it? Just the data that changes, or that is added between dumps.

[dave]

The databases are the most important, the files on the public web space are "typically" just configuration, theme, and upload files.

[linker]

When you are dumping the database, do you overwrite the previous dump or do you dump in a new space? Are you dumping manually or do you just set cPanel to dump the database by itself?