Backups are an essential part of managing your family history data and web site.
Not just for your kiwitrees site, but for any web site. Whatever problem you have, they can always be fixed from a good backup.
There are two main areas you should backup regularly:
- Your kiwitrees database (MySQL)
- Your media objects (the folder “/data/media/”)
Other things you might also want to protect could be:
- A GEDCOM file copy of your family tree data (but remember that all of the same information is held in your MySQL database)
- Custom theme files you have created (see this FAQ)
- Historical time line files you use (e.g. “histo.en_GB.php”)
We do not recommend keeping a backup of the kiwitrees software, as that is always easily downloaded and re-installed from this site.
Remember that most web hosting services do NOT backup your data, and this is your responsibility.
How to backup your kiwitrees site
Good full backups of your website are important. There are many ways to accomplish them. Here are two very suitable for a kiwitrees site:
The first option is to manually backup your files. Typically this is done by a developer or someone with some technical understanding of how websites are constructed.
It entails two processes:
- FTP the kiwitrees/data/ folder and all it’s content to your desktop computer and some form of external storage.
- Manually creating a dump of the MySQL database using PhpMyAdmin or a similar database tool, and also copying that file to your desktop computer and some form of external storage.
If FTP and SQL dB backups are not your thing you’ll likely want your web designer/developer to handle this for you or you might want to utilise the second option.
The second option is to use the tools built in to kiwitrees. They do much the same things as the first option, but without the complexity of FTP and MySQL data dumps. The tools available are:
- Export family tree data to a GEDCOM file (but remember that all of the same information is held in your MySQL database). This is done at Administration > Family trees > Manage family trees
- Backup your database using the tool built into kiwitrees at Administration > Tools > Database backup
- Finally, use the “Backup to Dropbox” module to copy both of the above to a Dropbox account. This avoids other risks such as hard-drive failure, theft etc of your local computer. More details about this module can be found in this FAQ page.