Hello All,
I have been building PHPRunner sites for a few years now and I know that although PHPRunner simplifies the process of building a dynamic PHP site, we still put many hours into tweaking and customizing these sites to suit our needs and the needs of customers. My biggest fear has always been having a site go down due to file corruption or disaster of some kind. For years I have searched for a suitable program to backup my PHP-MySql site. Until recently, Navicat PHP was my program of choice but was limited to just database backup. However, a lot of my sites save files to folders within the root directory in the site itself and other than just backing up my site to a repository (Plesk in my case), I wanted a physical copy backed up to my local drive.
I found a program called SiteVault that does the job very well. SiteVault will backup both my PHP files as well as MySql data all at one time. Once the connections are configured, it can be setup to work automatically on a schedule or manually with a single click of the mouse. The setup process is very easy and you can specify exactly which files and folders you wish to backup as well as which database tables. As some of you might be aware, certain hosting services will not allow a direct connection to database files for security reasons (Inspirunner for instance), but SiteVault will help you to upload a script to your site that will allow a connecton to your MySql files through PHP tunnel and also has all the options of Navicat like selecting passive mode , secure ftp, ect. Like I said, it is very easy and the program will walk you through the entire process of setting up your entire site backup step-by-step (even uploading the php tunnel script).
As far as performance goes, SiteVault speeds through the backup process by only backing up the changed or added files. Your initial backup will take the longest as all tables and file directories have to be created from scratch but from then on, then the incremental backup process begins and the process speeds up dramatically. When looking at actual site restoration performance, I took the time to copy a couple of my larger project sites (50 to 250 pages) and published them to my actual working test server site and intentionally completely destroyed both php and database files that contained over 20k records. With a couple mouse clicks the entire sites were restored within 10 minutes. Thats pretty fast considering it took me over 3 months to create the site! I repeated this process many times before actually purchasing SiteVault. Another great thing about SiteVault is that just like PHPRunner, their support response is pretty fast. I received a response to my questions within a few hours. The SiteVault software development team is still very active and I was also told that a new version is set to be released very soon and the upgrade to the new version is free.
When considering all the time spent on building your sites, the cost for the program is pretty cheap and there are many different options for purchasing SiteVault. They sell the software by the number of sites you want to back up and range from $19 for a single site to $99 for unlimited sites (which if you are like myself, you don't want to be limited) If you build PHPRunner sites to sell, this will be a great selling point and also a great way to make extra money monthly by offering your services of backing up their data on a daily basis.
I hope this post helps you guys out if you were in the hunt for a good all-in-one backup utility like I have been for years. As for all of you out there who have not taken backups into consideration, you really don't realize how much a single backup is worth to you until you realize all your data is lost.
Here is a link to SiteVault website http://www.site-vault.com/, Check out the videos and try out the free demo!
I found [email="alex@site-vault.com%20"]alex@site-vault.com [/email] to be very helpful to quickly answer any questions I had.
Regards,
Vince
vin7102 author
