Error report Concerning FrontPage

First, I'd like to note that I was also able to make the problem go away by first deactivating all the aggregator blocks appearing on the front page and then reactivating them. Don't ask me why it worked.

On the auto backups, if you run Drupal on a linux server and you have shell access you can go through the following Rube Goldberg procedure:

1. Run a script that backs it up periodically via cron (a couple of incidents made me paranoid so I run it every 6 hours) and keeps a series of backups:

#!/bin/sh

mv /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.olderyet /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.stillolderyet
mv /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.older /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.olderyet
mv /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.old /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.older
mv /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.old
mysqldump -u username -ppassword jkalb_db > /home/jkalb/db_bak.sql
zip /home/jkalb/db_bak /home/jkalb/db_bak.sql
rm /home/jkalb/db_bak.sql

2. Have another script on your home computer, if you have linux there, that downloads the latest backup periodically (in my case, once a day) and keeps another series of backups:

#!/bin/sh

mv /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.olderyet /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.stillolderyet
mv /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.older /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.olderyet
mv /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.old /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.older
mv /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip /home/jkalb/db_bak.zip.old
scp jkalb@myhostingprovider.net:/home/jkalb/db_bak.zip /home/jkalb

Then I have still another script that emails the most recent backup to me every few days:

#!/bin/sh

mail -s "backup" jkalb < ~/db_bak.zip

It then gets sorted automatically into a "backup" folder, so I end up with 6-hourly backups for the past day, daily backups for the past 4 days, and 4-daily backups before that (which I of course delete periodically).

I'm sure there are less kludgey ways to do it but this works and I'm not much of a techie. I'm told that in general simply mailing a binary file is likely to lead to a corrupted file but this seems to work, I suppose because the message doesn't get forwarded from machine to machine.

While this isn't totally on topic.... I do this myself. It's pretty easy using mysqldump and cron on most Unixes. Here's a shell script I use:

#! /bin/bash

ndx=1
today=$(date +'%F')
suffix=$(printf '%02d' $ndx)
fname="backup-$today-$suffix.sql"
aname="backup-$today-$suffix.tar.gz"

while [ -f $fname -o -f $aname ]; do
    let ndx=ndx+1
    suffix=$(printf '%02d' $ndx)
    fname="backup-$today-$suffix.sql"
    aname="backup-$today-$suffix.tar.gz"  
done

echo "Backup to: $fname" 

mysqldump  \
    --defaults-extra-file=/path/to/a/config/file/backup.conf \
    -h somehost.example.com -u user_name -B database > $fname

backup.conf has your password for the account, as so:

# DB Backup only

[client]
# The following password will be sent to all standard MySQL clients
password=da-secret-woyd

On Linux, I jjust set this up to run under cron, as often as I think I need to. The shell script makes sure that one backup doesn't clobber the previous.

You'd probably want to add another cron script to cull old back-up files, but like they say, that's an exercise for the reader.

Cheers, and a Happy St. Patrick's Day to the Dubliners,

Rob
Torenware Networks