Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

Thursday, 27 May 2010 03:01 CDT

dimkasta

Good morning.

I have been using Akeeba for some months now on my sites, and I must say that I am very happy with it. Actually I will upgrade to Pro regardless of your answer here :)

One of my sites has grown significantly for my shared hosting plan, so I am now considering upgrading to a VPS. However, since my job includes ASP.NET based applications as well, I am considering moving all my plans to a single Windows VPS.

I wanted to ask if there is a way to take automated backups with Scheduled tasks or a custom windows service in the place of cron.

Also, since I am very interested in S3, I wanted to know what is the procedure to restore from it. Can it be done through the tool? Or will I have to restore the archive manually in the component's archive folder and then use the restore procedure? The guide does not clarify this, so my guess is that S3 restoration is semi-manual.

Thank you very much for your consideration

Best regards
Dimitris

Thursday, 27 May 2010 09:22 CDT

dlb

Dimitris,

Nicholas discussed scheduling backups in this post. There is also Akeeba Remote, but that runs on the local computer and the local has to be powered on to trigger the scheduled backup. That doesn't sound like what you're looking for.

"Semi-automated" would be a good description of the restore from S3. You can't restore from the S3 location, you have to move the backup archive back to the site. You could move it to the Output folder and restore through the Administer Backups screen (requires Pro) or move it to the root of the site and use kickstart to extract and run the restore script (does not require Pro).

Dale L. Brackin
Support Specialist

English: native

Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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Thursday, 27 May 2010 10:36 CDT

dimkasta

Thanks a lot Dale.

That is pretty much what I expected.

I just finished setting up S3, and I have to say that I am a bit dissapointed, at least from the speed. Let s hope that their reliability is more ... Cloudly...

I m on my way to going pro on Akeeba now...

Saturday, 05 June 2010 01:41 CDT

nicholas

The upload speed depends on your server's outbound connection. I've had solid 1Mb/sec transfer speeds with a Rochen server in the US and an S3 bucket in Europe. Reliability is very good, there is a chance of 1 in a few billions of something going wrong. As a comparison, consumer hard drives have a MTBF (Mean Time Between Faults) of 300,000 hours, so it's far more likely that your local hard drive crashes than losing data from S3. Of course, the golden word in backup is redundancy. Have you daily backups stored in S3, but also keep a weekly or monthly copy on your hard drive and a removable medium, such as a flash disk or a DVD-ROM. Especially considering that DVDs are dirt-cheap they provide a very good means of "backing up the backups" :) You can never be too paranoid with your backups.

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!

Saturday, 05 June 2010 02:02 CDT

dimkasta

Hehe yeah... People (including myself) usually learn this the hard way...

About speed, yes I m getting nice speeds from my hostgator server as well. I t was just my first impression from uploading stuff from my pc.

Saturday, 05 June 2010 02:20 CDT

nicholas

Same here. I'd be a terrible liar if I said that I've never lost a backup. In fact, that's where the incentive to start writing backup software came.

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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