Backing Up Your Data

Anyone who’s worked with a computer knows that many things can go wrong to cause data to be lost. Hard drives and databases can become corrupt, power losses can cause data to be lost, and simple human error can accidentally erase hours of work. Whenever you make changes to your store, it is a good idea to back up those changes.

With the ShopSite database utilities, you can download your products and pages databases to a local computer as tab-delimited text files, and you can back up the databases on the server running ShopSite (and possibly copy those backups to a local computer).

• To download your products and/or pages database to a local computer:

  1. Select the Download Database link on the Database Maintenance screen.
  2. On the Database Extraction screen, choose either the products or pages to download.
  3. Click the Extract button.
  4. In the Save As... box, enter a descriptive file name that ends in .txt, as the databases are downloaded as tab-delimited text files.
  5. If desired, repeat the above steps for the other database.

• To back up your data on the ShopSite server:
  1. Select the Products and Pages link on the Database Maintenance screen.
  2. Click the Backup button on the Products and Pages screen.
  3. Check the boxes next to the databases that you want to backup.
  4. Click the Backup button.
  5. If you see a warning screen about overwriting the current backup files, click the Backup button (assuming you don’t mind overwriting the existing files).

• To copy your store’s backup files to your local PC:
  1. Find your store’s data directory. If you don’t know where it is, check your store’s Hosting Service settings in the Store Preferences area. That will tell you the path, so you can find it on the server.
  2. Use an FTP program to access that directory and download the entire contents. You should have no problem in downloading and storing that data on the hard drive of your personal computer. If you need to conserve space on your personal computer, then only download these files:
     • pages.db
     • products.db

     These databases contain all of the information for your pages and products. All of the other files contain configuration information for your ShopSite store. If for any reason you lose your data or a problem occurs, upload those files back up to the server and everything will be restored.

     If you do not have FTP access to your data directory, make sure that the server’s administrator is backing up your store’s data periodically.

Of course, you’ll also want to make sure that you have backup copies of all of the HTML files that you may have uploaded and the graphic files that you’re using on the site.

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