This is just a quick note to say there is a new version of the Cloud Backup extension now available on Magento Connect and also for direct download and manual installation – it is version 0.2.2. Our Magento Offsite backup beta progam has been great so far with many participants offering useful feedback and being very willing to help us debug issues.
In the first week we have been able to determine that:
- Different hosts have very different security settings that make taking full tar archive backups quite tricky.
- Windows hosting users cannot rely on a command-line tar application. If you are a WAMP or WIMP user please try it out and let me know if it works ok on your host.
As a result I have changed from a system call to tar to using the PHP class Archive_Tar to tar the files in a what will hopefully prove to be a platform independent manner.
I have also added the ability to exclude certain root directories from the backup. This is mainly as a way for users where web server permissions prevent access to certain Apache owned files by the user. For example you could exclude var if all of the session and cache files are Apache owned and unreadable.
The way to exclude files is to list them comma-separated in the exclude text field. Leave it blank to exclude nothing. If you notice backups failing due to files in a certain directory, try excluding it. You could always petition your web host for relaxed permissions in order to include the directory again. (Or move to a better Magento host!).
As always please feel free to let me know if you have any ideas for the development and report any issues – we’re happy to look into them. If you’re not already backing up your Magento store, why not try our cloud backup?