CiviCRM upgrade oddities: backups
One of the first and most important steps in a CiviCRM upgrade is to make sure you have a backup of your entire site.
Why is this an oddity?
This can be a fairly technical task for a non-technical site owner to undertake.
And there is no “one right way” for all CiviCRM sites. The steps to back up your site will vary greatly depending on your hosting platform, your CMS, and your database configuration.
If you've never done it before, you'll need the answers to several important questions first.
So can you skip this step?
No. Absolutely not.
Any upgrade can go wrong, CiviCRM or otherwise. If you don't have a pre-upgrade backup that you can revert to, you may be left with a permanently broken system.
Take the backup.
So how can you handle this oddity?
First, you'll need to answer all of these questions for yourself:
Which mySQL database is storing your CMS data?
Which mySQL database is storing your CiviCRM data?
Where are your site files stored (i.e., on your hosting platform, which directory has your CMS index.php file)?
Where are your backups going to be stored?
Once you have those answers, you'll need to select or formulate a process for creating and restoring backups.
CMS-based backup and restore options:
Drupal, WordPress, and other CMSs offer extensions that can back up your site and then restore those backups if needed.
But those methods, by default, won't include your CiviCRM database in the backup. You'll need to see whether they can be configured to do that.
Hosting-based backup options:
Many hosting providers do offer control-panel-based tools to backup your site, and to restore the site from a backup.
Check with your hosting provider to see what your options are.
Testing your backups:
A backup that's incomplete is about as good as no backup at all.
You'll want to test your backup system to ensure it covers everything.
The challenge is this: If you're not certain that your backup is complete (which is why you're testing it), do you really want to test it on your live site?
Probably not.
The answer is this: Whatever backup method you're using (CMS-based, or hosting-based), it should offer some way to restore your backup to a different location, such as your sandbox site.
That way you can take a backup of your live site, restore it into your sandbox site, and peruse the sandbox site to be sure the backup and restore both worked well.
Getting help:
Pre-upgrade backups are not something you want to skip. Getting this wrong can ruin years of priceless CRM data.
If you can't figure out on your own how to backup and restore all databases and files, get some help.
A developer or a CiviCRM coach should be able to help you get this working, so that you have reliable and reusable tools to manage your backups.
Don't take chances with your priceless constituent data.
All the best,
A.