Provide portal access to the files and database file from automatic backups
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Scott L.
One never knows when one will need to access a particular file or individual post or post revision from the database. As a result, the full backup feature is of limited use because you don't know you needed to run one until it is too late or you have to run them so often that the value of automatic backups is lost. Yet the automatic backups currently only allow restoring files, database, or both.
The ability to download the backup files and / or database backup as a .sql export would be a very valuable enhancement to the Nexcess portal.
Just yesterday I had to go find the post_content of a post that a customer had managed to lose. That one was on a different hosting and backup solution where I was able to just download last night's backup of the database, load it up locally in MySQL, copy the post content, and paste it into the post's record in the live site's database via phpmyadmin. I'd love it if it was easy and self-service to do the same thing with Nexcess.
Ideally I'd be able to pick any of the dates that are available and get the database and/or files from that date.
Thanks for considering this idea.
Tiffany Bridge
Thanks for this suggestion. Our nightly backups are part of our full-fleet backup process. The tool we use for that is a block-based backup solution, so there's not just a collection of your files sitting on a server somewhere for you to download. The result is a really reliable, efficient backup for recovery purposes. But the tradeoff is that the only way to get your files is to reconstruct them, by restoring the backup to a destination.
Our snapshot backups, however, are more like a control panel based backup you might be used to: those DO create a set of downloadable assets. But they are kicked off manually by the customer, because they're resource-intensive and consume your plan's disk allocation.
Depending on the application you use, certain third party site-level backup solutions are available to automate backups and store them offsite that might be best for this use case.
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Scott L.
Tiffany Bridge,
I understand that logic but it is the same thing ManageWP does with the difference being that they provide an interface for and capability to assemble a backup for download from the block base backup from any restore point in the history of what is still in retention. Snapshots are useful if I need to download now but not if I need to download last week and didn't know then that I needed to make a snapshot that I could download now.