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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#31828 How to clean up obsolete folders-to-be-skipped from a profile json

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Joomla! version
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PHP version
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Akeeba Backup version
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Latest post by on Saturday, 02 November 2019 18:17 CDT

jorlan
Hi,

We are developing a set of "generic" custom profiles for AkeebaBackup. What I mean by this: on some of our live sites we make a copy of a profile that we think is useful (e.g. for Amazon S3 storage), then remove info that is specifiec for that site and download the result. Then we have a profile for Amazon S3 that can be used on an other site.

When looking into the json files of these profiles, I noticed that some profiles contain settings for excluding folders and files on the original site, but these folders and files are no longer present on that site. As a result, in the Joomla back end there is no way to know that these settings were made - and still they are present in the profie.

So if by coincidence on a new site a folder or file would be created that has a name of path that is (unvisibly) present in the profile, it will be excluded from the backup? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

In theory we could cleanup the json, but personally I do not feel confident about doing that. I wouldn't like to make a mistake and ruin the whole profile.

Copying and editing existing profiles seemed to be such a good idea but I'm not so sure about this anymore. What would you advise us to do?


Kind regards

tampe125
Akeeba Staff
Hello,

So if by coincidence on a new site a folder or file would be created that has a name of path that is (unvisibly) present in the profile, it will be excluded from the backup? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Yes, you're right.
You can easily check that by yourself by importing a profile that has an excluded folder that does not exist, then manually create it and add some files inside. It should be skipped.

I'm afraid the only option you have is to manually edit the JSON file.

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

jorlan
Hi Davide,

Thanks for your reply. I can see that this happens indeed:

You can easily check that by yourself by importing a profile that has an excluded folder that does not exist, then manually create it and add some files inside. It should be skipped.


Instead of editing the json file I created a new profile from scratch and manually copied all settings for S3 from the live site, then stored this new profile as our "default starting point". So there won't be any hidden exclusions and neither will I create any errors when editing the json file.

I understand that it would be difficult to catch situations like this in the AkeebaBackup profile system, yet I was a bit surprised by this (accidental) discovery. Maybe you could issue a warning about this when copying profiles from live sites?


Kind regards,

tampe125
Akeeba Staff
I can see your point, but there are legitimate use case where you actually want to keep the same folder exclusion.
What you're doing is something pretty advanced, my best suggestion is to manually remove/edit those entries or to start from a blank profile as you did.

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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