About Sitecore Backup

Question

I am trying to backup a whole Sitecore website.
I know that the package designer can do part of the job, but not entirely.
Having a backup is always a good way when the site is broken accidently.
Is there a way or a tool to backup the whole Sitecore website?
I am new to the Sitecore, so any advise is welcome.
Thank you!

Answer 1

Take a look at Sitecore Instance Manager module. Works really well for packaging entire Sitecore instance.

Answer 2

Expanding bit more on what Trayek said, my suggestion would be to have a Continuous Integration (CI) and have automated deploy using Team City.

A good answer is also given here on Stack Overflow.

Basically in your case Teamcity would automatically 1. take back up of the current website (i.e. code) and deploy the new code on top of it. 2. Scripts can also be written to take a differential backup of the SQL databases, if need be.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

I'd suggest thinking of this in two parts, the first part is backing up the application which is a simple as making sure your application is in some SCM system.

For that you can use Team Development for Sitecore. One of it's features allows you to connect a Visual Studio project to your Sitecore instance.

You can select Sitecore items that you want to be stored in your solution and it will serialize them and place them into your solution.

You can then check them into your SCM system and sleep easier.

The thing to note is deciding which item to place in source control, generally you can think of Sitecore items has developer owned and Content Editor owned. The items you will place in your solution are the items that are developer owned; templates, sublayouts, layouts, and content items that you need for the site to function are good examples.

This way if something goes bad a base restoration is quick and easy.

The second part is the backup of the content in Sitecore that has been added since your deployment. For that like Trayek said above use a SQL job to do the back-ups at whatever interval your are comfortable with.

If you're bored I have a post on using TDS (Team Development for Sitecore) you can check out at Working with Sitecore, Part Nine: TDS

Answer 4

I have no knowledge of a tool that can do this for you, but there are a few ways you can handle this in an easy way:

1) you can create a database backup of the master database, but this only contains content and no files like media files that are saved on disk or your complete and build solution. It is always a good idea to schedule your database backup every night and save the backups for at least a week or more.

2) When you use the package designer, you can create dynamic pacakges that can contain all your content, media files and solution files on disk. This is an easy way to deploy the site onto a new Sitecore installation all at once, but it requires a manual backup every time.

3) Another way you can use is to serialize your entire content-tree to an xml-format on disk from the Developer tab. Once serialized, you can revert them back into the content tree.

Answer 5

We've got a SQL job running to back-up the databases nightly. Apart from that, when I deploy code and it's a small bit I usually end up backing up only the parts I'm going to replace. If it's a big code deploy I just back up the whole website (code-wise anyway) before deploying the code package.

Apart from that we also run scheduled backups of the code (although I don't know the intervals), and of course we've got source control if everything else fails.

If you've got an automated deployment tool you could also automate the above of course.

Answer 6

Before a major deploy of content or code, I typically backup the master database and zip everything in the website directory minus the App_Data and temp directories. That way if the deploy goes wrong, I can restore the code and database fairly quickly and be back to the previous state.