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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#11731 Best practice for website with very heavy image folder

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
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PHP version
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Akeeba Backup version
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Latest post by nicholas on Wednesday, 28 March 2012 04:44 CDT

Tuesday, 27 March 2012 23:10 CDT

user46704
Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Have I searched the tickets before posting? Yes
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Joomla! version: 1.5.26
PHP version: 5.3.10
MySQL version: 5.1.54
Host: (optional, but it helps us help you)
Akeeba Backup version: 3.4.3

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Please attach a ZIP file containing your Akeeba Backup log file in order for us to help you with any backup or restoration issue. If the file is over 2Mb, please upload it on your server and post a link to it.

Description of my issue:

My client has a site using jomsocial with about 500 users and an image gallery which means that the image folder is quite big (about 850MB) and growing due to new image galleries being added as well as images for events and user generated images.

For now Akeeba is working fine using a cron job, the backup is made everyday successfully, it's working as announced and as it should (great extension!). But now backups weight around 900MB each. And if/when i need to download the .jpa archive it takes way too much time and have problem as FTP connection drop at times.

So my question is as follow: in your opinion and experience, what is the best practice to backup a site which is already 900MB and growing?

Should i set it to split the archive during backup?

Should i just back-up the image folder daily and the rest of the site once a week since it's pretty much the image folder that changes daily? But since a site backup without the image folder is only about 40MB, is it really worth it to not include it in every backup?

thanks a lot for your help and sharing. And huge thanks for the great extension.

Wednesday, 28 March 2012 03:19 CDT

nicholas
Hm, there is actually no best practice, as it depends on what you need, how easy you want the restoration to be and so on.

If you want to easily transfer your site locally for development. Create two backup profiles. The first profile is a full site backup which excludes the image directories. The second profile is a files only backup which excludes all directories and files except the image directories. Schedule both to run daily, but make sure they launch half an hour apart (e.g. the first profile runs on 0:00, the second one on 0:30). In order to restore your site you will need to restore the first archive, then extract the second archive in order to add your images back to the site.

If you want easy restorations. Only have one profile, like you do right now and schedule it to run daily. If you need to create a development copy of your site, create a new full site backup profile, exclude the images directories and take a backup only when you need it. This is what I am doing with this site (I have tons of data due to attachments and support tickets, the second profile doesn't include them).

If you enjoy torturing yourself, you can do an incremental backup. Create one full site backup profile, excluding the images directories and have it run daily. Create a second, incremental files only profile and have it every day run half an hour after the first profile. Pitfall: you MUST not use quotas; this profile will only back up the images which were added/modified since the previous backup with the same profile. A good idea is to also create a third, full site backup profile running once every week and keeping only the last backup. Restoring your site can be done in two ways:
a. Restore the latest backup with the first profile, then extract all archives of the second (incremental backup) profile.
b. Restore the latest backup of the third profile, then extract all archives of the second (incremental backup) profile taken since the latest third profile's backup.

Out of all these strategies, I personally prefer the second one. It makes it very easy to restore a backup in case something really bad happens. Moreover, if you need to create a dev site, all you have to do is to grab a quick backup of your site.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 28 March 2012 04:41 CDT

user46704
Thanks a lot nicholas for the explanations and suggestions.
It's greatly appreciated.

I know what to do now.

Cheers

Wednesday, 28 March 2012 04:44 CDT

nicholas
You're welcome!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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