Using Joomlapack to Backup a Joomla Site

I ventured into the world of backups, dev sites, and migrations this week. To my pleasant surprise, it was one of the easiest Joomla processes I’ve yet to adopt. A few simple steps and I had my site backed up and was sleeping peacefully knowing that I had successfully added one more layer of protection to my online presence. I whole heartily tip my hat to the developers at Joomlapack who have put together what I am touting as one of the best Joomla extensions ever. Here’s the steps I took to make a backup:

1. Download the Joomlapack component and the Kickstart.php utility from the Joomlapack website.
2. Install the Joomlapack component in the administrator backend of your site.
3. It may give you a few warnings that you need to resolve. The great thing is it tells you how to resolve them!
4. The file format may be set to .zip by default but you’ll want to change it to the jpa format which is best.
5. Then you click backup and watch it run.
6. Save the backup file locally or leave it in a secure folder on your server.

If you want to get really fancy, you can setup some cronjobs on your server to automate the backup for you at set days/times. And then if you want to migrate or restore a site, here’s what you need to do:

1. Upload the kickstart.php and the jpa backup file to the root of the new target site
2. Setup a new database on the new site and write down the host, username, db name and password.
3. Use a browser to go to www..com/kickstart.php
4. Follow the step by step instructions and enter the new database name/password etc when asked.
5. Your site will appear just as it was before.

I’ve used Joomlapack twice now and it is now officially a part of my Joomla repertoire.

Backup and sleep well.