Backup option for apps. - web apps need it too.

-
All of your web applications should have an automated backup - and restore procedure.

For web applications, allow your users to back up their accounts.

Luckily many web hosts have backup software enabled within their control panels (cpanel etc). So it's easy to set up automated backups from these control panels.

End users should also have the option of backing up their data. Just so they can have an extra piece of mind. If they stuff something up, they can just restore from a backup. Pretty simple.

An sql dump might not be the best backup format... although it's pretty good. Maybe you didn't separate your data for different users when you designed your database. So just doing a database dump might not be available. If you give them a database dump they might get other clients data. You might need to write a custom backup procedure - one which knows how your database is designed.

I guess this is why most web applications fail to give end users backups - All of the user information is not separated within their database clearly. Because they forgot to design for backups in the beginning, and now it is too hard to implement on top.

So the moral of this web design fairy tale - 'design for backups in the beginning'.



Melbourne Web Developer Written by a Melbourne web developer. Available for your projects - php, mysql, e commerce, javascript, CMS, css, flash, actionscript, python, games, postgresql, xml.

Comments

Chrisranjana.com software said…
Using a version control system like SVN also makes a lots of sense

Chris
http://www.chrisranjana.com
7:03 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Draft 3 of, ^Let's write a unit test!^

-
Image
So, I started writing this for people who want to 'contribute' to Community projects, and also Free Libre or Open source projects. Maybe you'd like to get involved, but are unsure of where to begin? Follow along with this tutorial, and peek at the end in the "what is a git for?" section for explanations of what some of the words mean. Draft 1, 2018/07/18 - initial draft. Draft 2, 2019/11/04 - two full unit test examples, assertions, making a pull request, use python 3 unittest substring search, "good first issue" is a thing now. Started "What is a git for? Jargon" section. Draft 3, 2020/12/12 - default branch name is main. What's first? A test is first. A unit test is a piece of code which tests one thing works well in isolation from other parts of software. In this guide, I'm going to explain how to write one using the standard python unittest module, for the pygame game library. You can apply this advice to most python pr...
Read more

Is PostgreSQL good enough?

-
Image
tldr; you can do jobs, queues, real time change feeds, time series, object store, document store, full text search with PostgreSQL. How to, pros/cons, rough performance and complexity levels are all discussed. Many sources and relevant documentation is linked to. Your database is first. But can PostgreSQL be second? Web/app projects these days often have many distributed parts. It's not uncommon for groups to use the right tool for the job. The right tools are often something like the choice below. Redis for queuing, and caching. Elastic Search for searching, and log stash. Influxdb or RRD for timeseries. S3 for an object store. PostgreSQL for relational data with constraints, and validation via schemas. Celery for job queues. Kafka for a buffer of queues or stream processing. Exception logging with PostgreSQL (perhaps using Sentry) KDB for low latency analytics on your column oriented data. Mongo/ZODB for storing documents JSON (or mangodb for /dev/null replacemen...
Read more

post modern C tooling - draft 6

-
Image
Contemporary C tooling for making higher quality C, faster or more safely. DRAFT 0 - 10/11/18,  DRAFT 1 - 9/16/19, 7:19 PM, I'm still working on this, but it's already useful and I'd like some feedback - so I decided to share it early. DRAFT 2 - 10/1/19, mostly additions to static analysis tools. DRAFT 3 - 10/4/19, updates on build systems, package management, and complexity analysis.  DRAFT 4 - 10/6/19, run time dynamic verification and instrumentation, sanitizers (asan/ubsan/etc), performance tools, static analyzers. DRAFT 5 - C interpreter(s).  DRAFT 6 - 11/6/19 , mention TermDebug vim,  more windows debugging tools, C drawing for intro. In 2001 or so people started using the phrase "Modern C++". So now that it's 2019, I guess we're in the post modern era? Anyway, this isn't a post about C++ code, but some of this information applies there too. No logo, but it's used everywhere. Welcome to the post modern era. S...
Read more