@phani00 Can we make a backup of our despertarespiritual.org wp site? I will be updating our Meta Ad strategy to direct leads to the site and try onsite conversion. So I will be developing more the site. Before starting this new stage I’d like to make a backup first.
hare krsna,
sorry for the hickup with the pending post, this came as a surprise to me too. this discourse forum software has had some changes recently, including how groups and their security setup works. apparently moderation of new posts has been enabled by default, means new posts have to be approved by staff. i changed this now, new posts will go thru.
as i mentioned in a private message earlier, this forum isn’t really active yet, hasn’t been officially launched, and most who are active so far have admin or moderator roles that include all permissions anyway. so anybody reading this, if you experience things that seem strange or perhaps not as they should, let me know! within a topic or reply, or by direct message to @phani00.
backup of despertarespiritual.org :
i have been making regular backups of the site since about one year. here are the backups stored on digitalOcean spaces storage:
i create a MySQL dump of the database, storing it in a folder db/ within the file system, then create a compressed archive (.tar.gz) of the whole thing, transfering that to cloud storage.
this happens roughly every two days, while malware scans are run every day. i do that for all active websites hosted on our AWS servers, which includes despertare.
within a few weeks we run out of cloud storage within the cheapest price bracket and i remove backups, keeping ~1 backup / month for the last year, less frequent earlier, more frequent for the recent weeks.
these backups are a bit of a trip to restore: they have to be transfered from cloud storage back to the AWS server, uncompressed, and restored to the file system with correct ownership & permissions, replacing the current structure, same with the database, which has to replace the currently running one.
if you tell me that you are planning to make some changes that may or may not work, i can create a readily-available backup that stays on the server, for a limited time, until you know that your changes did work. that can take a day or two but not much more; despertare needs some 2.2 GB of disk space (including the DB dump).
i won’t do that with every site under development, but since your’e dealing with 16k+ contacts it seems important enough for me to take the trouble.
Thank you for clarifying the post approval.
I have not done many changes since 5 days ago, so I think we are good to go with current backups. If we have any trouble we could restore latest before today 20/05/2026. I just wanted to double check that we have a backup.
Thank you for all the information, it is very handy to know this.
So I’ll start this new stage for our website today.