Command Line Backup Alternatives

Most unix systems come with tools that are needed to create and manipulate backup files from the command line. If you have telnet or console access to your server, you may be able to use some or all of these commands.

Creating a backup

tar -cpvf backupfile.tar directories

Using the 'c' flag with the 'tar' command creates a new archive. 'p' preserves permissions and 'v' uses verbose mode, which will show you the names of all of the directories and files being added to your archive. To back up files, put one or more directories or files in place of directories above.

If you can always keep your backups in the same place, we recommend that you use relative paths rather than absolute paths when specifying directories.

To back up your Discus board, consider backing up your administration directory, HTML directory, and script directory. You can find these directory paths in your discus.conf file.

The following is an example command to create a backup file in your current directory of your Discus board:

tar -cpvf backup.tar ../discus_admin ../cgi-bin/discus ../html/discus

Restoring a backup

tar -xpvf backupfile.tar

The above command will extract your backup file. If you created the backup file using a command similar to the last command in the "Creating a backup" section, it is important that you execute the command from the same directory in which you ran the command to create the backup. If you run the command elsewhere, your Discus board will be restored to some other directory.

Compressing/uncompressing a backup

To compress:

gzip -9 backupfile.tar

To uncompress:

gunzip backupfile.tar.gz

Dumping a database

If you are using the MySQL database function, you can use the mysqldump command to dump the data from the database into a text file. This text file can later be used to insert the data back into the database, either on the current server or a new server.

mysqldump -uusername -p databasename > textfile

username: The username from your Database Manager needed to connect to the database.

databasename: The name of the database from your Database Manager.

textfile: The name of the desired resulting text file, which will contain your database information. Caution: This file will be large!

For further documentation...

For additional documentation on the tar command, type man tar at the command line. Or, visit the online tar manual:

http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar/index.html

For additional documentation on the gzip and gunzip commands, type man gzip at the command line. Or, visit the online gzip manual:

http://www.gnu.org/manual/gzip/index.html