Backing Up Your Site

EditMe keeps 10 days of daily off-site backups for all sites. However, these backups are for recovery of problems on the EditMe servers and are not available for customer download. Read How Secure is EditMe? for details on our internal backup processes.

There are three ways for EditMe customers to make their own backups of their sites.

1. Site Export Module - You can install the Site Export module into your site to create a browsable HTML or XML export of the content on your site.
2. Back Up Your Site with a Spider Tool - Use any of several open source, shareware and commercial packages available that can "spider", or pull your entire EditMe site down to your local hard drive as HTML files. This provides the benefit of being able to view your site backup using a web browser. However, these backups cannot be restored to your live site by EditMe Support staff.
3. Full Site Customer Backup - You have the additional option of downloading a compressed file backup of your site that is updated nightly. This backup isn't much use to users off-line, but can be used to restore your live EditMe site to a previous state. There is a $50 charge to restore your site from a customer backup.

Also see: Will I be able to export a backup of my content and transfer it to another site if I stop using EditMe?

1. Site Export Module

See the Modules page for module instructions to view and install Modules into your site. The Site Export Module page provides details about the export module.

2. Back Up Your Site with a Spider Tool

There are several open source, shareware, and commercial tools that can create an off-line version of your EditMe site for off-line browsing. A popular command line tool is 'wget'. This is available on Linux/UNIX systems, and is also available for Windows systems. See http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html for more information. Wget is very powerful, but is not as easy to use as HTTrack.

EditMe highly recommends the open source program HTTrack, a powerful and easy-to-use tool that can backup your entire EditMe site for off-line browsing and archival purposes. HTTrack can be downloaded for free at http://www.httrack.com.

To download your publicly viewable site, simply add http://YOURSITENAME.editme.com as a URL to download.

If you want to download password protected content from your site, specify this URL instead:

http://YOURSITENAME.editme.com/_Login?mode=login
&user-username=YOURUSERNAME&user-password=YOURPASSWORD

Be sure the lines above is entered in as a single line!

Change YOURSITENAME to your EditMe site name, YOURUSERNAME to a user name for your site, and YOURPASSWORD to the user's password. This will allow HTTrack to log into your site and download password protected content.

NOTE: Do not provide an Administrator user name and password. Instead, create a user that has Read Only access to your site's content. This will ensure that HTTrack does not change anything on your site while backing it up. If you must use an administrator user, follow the third tip below to exclude pages beginning with an underscore. Failing to do so will delete all your site's users!

TIP: If your password contains more than letters and numbers then it may be easier to change it to a simpler password (strictly alphanumeric) than figure out how to "escape" the non-alphanumeric characters.

TIP: If you are using HTTrack on a password protected site, be sure to exclude the Log Off link. This is done in the options screen of HTTrack. Your site's Log Off link looks like /_Login?mode=logoff.

TIP: You can save a lot of time and disk space (and protect against an administrator login changing your site) by excluding files that begin with an underscore (_). All Admin pages in EditMe begin with an underscore, so it's best to keep HTTrack out of them. You can do this by adding "*/_*" to the list of exclusions in HTTrack. This will cause HTTrack to only download the current version of each page that can be browsed to. You can also keep HTTrack from saving three of every page by excluding "*show-menu=false" and "*show-menu=true".

3. Full Site Customer Backup

You can download a compressed file containing all of your site's data. This backup can be provided to EditMe support to restore your site to a previous version. The charge for restoring a backup is $50. Backups older than 1 month may incur additional charges to restore.

To download the backup for your site, go to http://YOURSITENAME.editme.com/backup/backup.tar.gz. You must be logged in as an Administrator to download this file. This file is replaced on a daily basis with your site's current data. You may wish to download this file daily, weekly, or monthly to keep an archive of your site should you need to restore it to a previous state, such as in a case of wiki vandalism.

Due to the size of these backup files, they cannot be emailed to users. You can use wget to automate downloading the file if you like. You can schedule wget to regularly download your backup using a "Scheduled Task" in Windows or "cron" for Linux or UNIX.Here is a sample wget command to download your site's backup file. This command logs in as the site's administrator and then downloads the file to backup.tar.gz. Note: this command must be executed without line breaks.

wget http://YOURSITENAME.editme.com/_Login --post-data="mode=login
&user-username=YOURADMINUSERNAME&user-password=YOURADMINPASSWORD
&redirect=%2Fbackup%2Fbackup.tar.gz"