Backup and Version Control

A backup policy is often overlooked but essential.

It is not the responsibility of a hosting organisation (such as the MIS) to mitigate against your loss of data. Backups are kept under the MIS, but their purpose is to cover disasters that affect the host servers.

Should a school require to recover backed-up information through the MIS, it will be expensive- possibly amounting to thousands of dollars depending on the elapsed time.

Essentially there are two reasons for recovering lost information:

Information is lost due to a system failure
Required information is overwritten

Both circumstances must be considered when devising a policy.
A backup is not valid until it has been tested.

Points to consider:

Local and remote copies of your site (are they adequate backups for each other?)
The importance of your information (is yesterday's copy good enough?)
Your school's backup routine (is yesterday's information available?)
The cost and availability of restoring information (is the information stored locally? Are technical staff available?)
Do you need to keep a copy of drafts (or just published versions?)

Your website backup policy must address areas not covered by the school policy.

Possible strategies:

Copy the entire local site to CD prior to editing
Copy pages prior to editing. (Append the date and time to the filename)
Implement a version control system such as CVS

Content Management Systems (Joomla! etc)

These systems require some different strategies since the information is directly entered into the system.

Settings

Record important settings. When installing components or modules keep a record of all information entered. (A screenshot is a convenient way of doing this.)

The appearance of a website in Joomla is customised by making changes to the index.php and template_css.css. Make a copy of these files before editing. Save each edited copy so you can roll back to any required version (Append the date and time to the filename).

Content

Joomla pages can be saved by using the Archive Manager. This keeps an offline copy of the pages.

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