This page has some background information on making backups and explains some basic *nix backup and restore procedures.
Your wiki installation contains some unique data in the following directories:
local/ Local configuration scripts
cookbook/ Recipes obtained from the Cookbook
pub/ Publicly accessible files
wiki.d/ Wiki pages
uploads/ Uploaded files (attachments)
A good backup plan will include periodically archiving these directories — or at bare minimum local/ and wiki.d/. Good practice dictates keeping your backup archives on a separate machine.
When it comes to backup, simpler is better. Since the pmwiki distribution is very small (about 1/4 megabyte), it's simplest to just archive the distribution files along with the data.
The following *nix command, executed from the parent directory of your wiki's directory, will put a complete backup archive of your site in your home directory.
tar -zcvf ~/wiki-backup-`date +%Y%m`.tar.gz wiki/
Your site can be restored and running in under 30 seconds with
tar -zxvf ~/wiki-backup-200512.tar.gz find wiki/uploads/ -type d |xargs chmod 777 find wiki/wiki.d/ -type d |xargs chmod 777
The simple restore commands above will give you world-writable files and directories. You can avoid world-writable permissions by letting PmWiki create directories with the proper attributes (ownership and permissions) for you.
Start with
tar -zxvf ~/wiki-backup-200512.tar.gz rm -rf wiki/wiki.d rm -rf uploads chmod 2777 wiki/
Now upload a file in each group that had uploads. If your site doesn't have uploads, just visit your site once so the wiki.d/ directory will be created.
Finish your installation with
chmod 755 wiki/ tar -zxvf ~/wiki-backup-200512.tar.gz
The commands on this page assume your site is in a directory called "wiki/". The test backup was made in December, 2005 so it's named accordingly.
Your site will only have an uploads/ directory if uploads are enabled.
The backup command uses a date stamp (YYYYMM) in the filename. If you automate the command via cron you'll wind up with monthly snapshots of your site. You can get a daily snapshot by appending %d to the date command (`date +%Y%m%d` will get you YYYYMMDD). Be wary of space limitations if you have a large uploads/ directory.
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This page may have a more recent version on pmwiki.org: PmWiki:BackupAndRestore, and a talk page: PmWiki:BackupAndRestore-Talk.