Ah, New Years Eve. It's the time for parties, reminiscing, and the old tradition of New Years resolutions. We promise ourselves we'll exercise, read that important book, donate to charity, or -- depending on the number of web sites we're responsible for -- vow that this is the year to set up a backup plan. Few things, after all, are more terrifying than the realization that a server hiccup has wiped out a web site, or a hasty change deployed to the live site has nuked important content. Fortunately, there's a module that can help. Backup and Migrate offers site builders a host of options for manually and automatically backing up their sites' databases -- and integrates with third-party backup services, to boot!
Backup and Migrate offers a number of options for preserving your Drupal site's database, but all of them revolve around three important choices. You can choose to backup just a select group of database tables, or the whole kit and kaboodle -- useful for ditching the unwieldy cache and watchdog tables that Drupal can easily recreate. You can choose the destination for your backup -- drop it into a private directory on your server, download it directly to your computer if you're performing a manual backup, or send it to several supported third-party servers. And finally, you can run backups manually or schedule them to occur automatically.
In its simplest form, you can use the module to manually pull down a snapshot of a site's database for safe keeping, or to do local development with the latest and greatest production data. For real safety, though, you can tie it to services like Amazon S3 storage, or the new NodeSquirrel offsite backup service. Set up scheduled daily or weekly backups, tell it how long to keep existing backups around, and rest assured that regular snapshots of your site's critical data will be tucked away for safe keeping when you need them.
When disaster strikes, you can use the Backup and Migrate module to upload one of those database backups, and restore your site to the state it was in when the backup was made.
It's important to remember that Backup and Migrate won't solve all of your problems. It requires a third-party addon module (Backup and Migrate Files) to archive and restore the site's important file uploads directory, for example. In addition, the easy one-click backup and restore process can tempt developers to forgo safe deployment strategies for new features. Just because it's possible to download a database snapshot, do configuration work on your local computer, then re-upload the snapshot to the live server, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
That said, Backup and Migrate is an excellent tool that's proven its worth on countless sites. Its clean integration with third-party file storage services also means that it's a great transitional path towards a full-fledged backup strategy for business-critical data. If you aren't using it, check it out -- and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with keeping your site's data safe.
Here is a video on Drupalize.Me which shows you how to use Backup and Migrate.