Backing up website serverside, how-to?

[Naughty]

Could anybody please give me the command line to use if we want to make a backup copy of our entire installation on the server (because we're upgrading software, we need to be able to roll-back).

Cheers, downloading through FTP is taking days;)

[Naughty]

cp -rp /path/to/site /path/to/backup_dir

Is this correct?

[zagi]

Yes, cp -rp /path/to/site /path/to/backup_dir will work, but its better to use:


cp -Rp, it is a safer version of the command.

Also, VERY IMPORTANT, this will only backup your files -- most likely you have a database associated with the site which will need to be backed up as well:

mysqldump -Q -q -e --add-drop-table --database DATABASE_NAME > DATABASE_NAME.sql

Replace DATABASE_NAME with your db and this will make a file with all of your SQL data, best thing would be to run this command in /path/to/backup_dir so you have all of your restore files in 1 place.