Peter Woodall's picture

Using Wordpress on Amazon via the Hub (all works great).

I have been using this backup facility without really giving it much thought until I noticed that my server uses almost 6 Gb of disk space but the backups run about 27 Mb.

My understanding is that the backup includes files 'added' to the base system.

My concern is the database which I rather doubt is being backed up (its a very static site so it changes very little).

What is the best way to get a database backup 'noticed' by TKLBAM and included?

Appreciate the help.

Peter

 

 

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Is to restore it to a new server. And regardless it is very important IMO to be checking your backups regularly. Whilst they should work, you don't want to find out that they don't when you need them!

Assuming that you are using the default WordPress DB that the appliance is set up with it should certainly include your complete DB.

One thing to keep in mind that there are 'full' backups and 'incremental' ones. By default full backups run monthly, whereas incremental ones run daily. Full backups include everything and are self contained. Incremental ones are much smaller, because they only contain changes since the last incremental backup. The downside is that they rely on all the incremental backups before that, back to the last full backup. So make sure that you are looking at the full backup size.

Also note that your running server will include significant amounts of cache and temporary files (which aren't backed up because they're only really useful in a running system and would need to be regenerated anyway) plus significant amounts of 'system files' (which also aren't backed up as they would already be present in a clean install).

Finally TKLBAM backups are heavily compressed and text files (as DB dumps are and php files are, etc) compress very well, it would not surprise me that a running file system vs TKLBAM backup would significantly be different.

To see what has been being backed up you can look at the log:

cat /var/log/tklbam-backup

To inspect what is actually being backed up your could run a TKLBAM backup and dump to a local location to manually sift through (I use the example directory '/some/dir'):

tklbam-backup --dump=/some/dir

Or you could just run a simulation of a backup:

tklbam-backup -s

If you find that there is something missing then you could add it using TKLBAM overrides. (read about overrides and other tklbam options in the docs).

I hope that gets you going...

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