@mkerwin - understood, thanks. 

About Undo button - you mean that when you pressed it, nothing happened or that it was not shown at all? If the latter, this sounds like a browser glitch since that button is always displayed for all pages. Just FYI. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

The undo button was not shown at all.

I had a sneaking suspicion it was Firefox.  It's been acting very weirdly the last month or so.  They must be updating it because it frequently  closes without notice.

Thanks again.

We're a professional association of archivists, so for me, backup is not just for emergency webpage recovery, but long term preservation of web page content and visual appearance - most or all versions of each page.  With older systems, I just saved the HTML files, graphics, etc. and added dates to the file names. 

Are there any workarounds that would enable me to preserve this data (locally - not just on WA), without eating up more time than I have to devote to web page maintenance?  WA was supposed to make my tasks easier, not more complicated.  (I didn't realize it would take away my preservation capabilities).  Please advise.  Thanks!

Right now, the only way I can think of is to manually via your browser (Save page as...) - for each page. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Thanks, Dimitry, for the tip on manually saving pages. That gives us an idea on what to do for critical pages.

 

Our organization is a brand-new customer, though, and the lack of user backup was our biggest concern and made us think very hard about whether we should sign up or not. We LOVE just about everything about the system except for two things: 1) not having e-mail addys with our domain name without going through the hassle of Google setup, and 2) much more important, not having user backup. I can  work around the e-mail situation but the lack of backup control makes me nervous.

 

Please move user backup as high as possible on the wish list and put effort into it. It is very important to users.

 

P.S. If we hadn't been able to easily export the member and contact databases, we would not have signed up for the system. I am using that as our backup for that information because that is our lifeblood.

 

It doesn't always work exactly right but I've used Web Stripper to pull down entire websites. Database pages get converted to html. http://www.webstripper.net/  Also Adobe Acrobat has a feature to convert & save all pages in a website to PDF.

Thanks for sharing!

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We wish to be able to back up web pages or whole website. Is it possible to use dreamweaver and connect via FTP to download the whole website, make changes, and upload page? This would be a form of "back-up" for the site. If this is possible please let me know as using the html editor in the W.A. system only allows for a few options and I wish to use Dreamweaver for editing web pages and the back-up of whole website on a local PC.

Thanks

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Custom Artwork & Web Design
www.TJG-Designs.com

Sorry, this is not possible with Wild Apricot platform. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

So, your saying there is no FTP option? What if i wanted to design web pages with Dreamweaver or another software it's not possible to upload to the site after?

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Custom Artwork & Web Design
www.TJG-Designs.com

Sorry, this is not possible. Our system is not a typical 'dumb' hosting where you just upload your page created with any software - it's software as a service, with built-in CMS so pages can only be created/edited with integrated web editor. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I agree with most of the people on this thread.  An ability to backup and export the data is critical and should be top on the list.  You mentioned that part of the complexity is due to incompatibility between versions of the site.  Even if the standard operating procedure was to have all customers backup again right after a new release, that would be reasonable.

I'd love to see it implemented something like this, with individual modules.

Files.zip:  The entire resources folder is captured in a ZIP file with the directory tree.

Configuration.xml:  All configuration data is stored in a well documented, schematized XML document.

PageData.xml:  The configuration and content for all pages is stored in a well documented, schematized XML document.  Each page would be in a Page element with attributes for the type, meta tags, name, path, etc.  a child element would exist for each of the content blocks.

UserData.xml: All user information is available in a well documented, schematized XML document.

Others for forum data, events, finances, etc.

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All of the module files would be captured into a Backup-YYYY-MM-DD.zip file.  An entire backup file could be selected and restored.  However, a single module could be selected and restored.  e.g. just page data.  This would also provide a nice way to bulk import data.  I imagine this would make it easier to move from other CMS systems to WA.  Tools could be written to transform backups from other systems to WA's schema.

 

Thanks Gary. Your suggestions align well with our own thinking.

We do not expect to implement restoring from backup -at least for a while - though because the software evolves all the time and maintaining backwards compatibility will be a challenge.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

In reading these comments and thinking through various scenarios, it seems that it would be difficult for you to offer backup guidelines that would cover all situations and all organization types.  So, here's our situation and I'll ask you to comment on what backup holes we need to plug.

We've got about 200 webpages using membership renewals, applications, event registration as well as discussion forums.  We keep backups of the member and contact database, all uploaded documents and graphics.  We currently do not export our invoices to a backup.  We have NOT taken the tedious step of backing up the source code of the 200 webpages, but changes go through a single individual which might mitigate some risk of loss.  We're assuming that Wild Apricot can recover from any hardware/software malfunction without any loss to our systems.  We're hoping that in the unlikely event that some hacker recreationally destroyed our website that Wild Apricot could reconstruct it (?).

Our website manager uses a Mac so WebStripper (or PageNest) is not an option.  Given the Chief Apricot's previous comments, I'm not sure WebStripper is viable as a source from which to upload the website anyway.

What additionally should we be doing?

I think you are doing quite enough and I am confident that backup systems we have in place are sufficient for disaster recovery situations. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

It would be nice to have the ability to export all custom/global JS and site content with the push/click of one button for purpose safeguarding custom code and design and content.  

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Thanks,
Felix Figuereo
Managing Director
Nicasio Design & Development
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Office - 912.292.1716
Direct - 912.441.7011
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It is not just for backups. If I could download a zip with just the page data html I can use it for audits. For example: find broken links. Find orphan pages. List all external links. These are easy scripts to write (I use bash on linux) and run on the desktop, not the server.  Downloading one page's html at a time defeats this whole strategy.

Today's task is to find links that still point back to our old web site. It will take a week instead of an hour without this download.

I am thinking that it's better to build purpose-specific functions. Very few of our users would be able to use zipped HTML of all pages to do things like you have described. Your suggestions make good sense and I would appreciate if you could post them as new threads. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

FYI - Website Backup tool. 

It won't create a backup that you can easily restore from but if you just want a copy of all your publicly visible pages/images you could use a tool like HTTrack Website Copier.

 

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Frank | User Experience Designer
Wild Apricot