Maintenance

Website Maintenance

This section describes how to make database backups and how to perform database maintenance.

To access your website maintenance panel select Maintenance from the secondary administrative menu located at the top right side in your web browser right above the main administrative menu.

What is backup?

Backup is copy of current and/or recent data that you may download to your hard drive (or other medium) for the purpose of having a second copy of an original source in case of damage to the original one.

Only data changed or added since the backup was made will be lost.

Create backup

Your database backup will contain information about entries (comments, articles, categories, users), while all the settings and preferences will be exported into the configuration file. Back up your files regularly!

To create Database Backup select go to Maintenance → Quick launch → Create backup

In the Dashboard section on the right, click on Create backup button and confirmation message that your database backup was created will appear. Reload your page and your database backup will appear in the Manage backup list below the dashboard.

On the right hand side of your database name you may find restore, download and delete backup links.

Let's explain their functions in detail.

Download database

When you backup your database, it will be stored in /backup directory on your web server, but we recommend saving a copy of your database somewhere on your hard drive because even the most reliable computer/server could break down one day.

To download your database click on the download icon on the right.

Dialog box should appear prompting you to save the file locally. Click Save button.

In the Save as dialog box, select location on your hard drive where you want to keep your backup copies. We recommend you to insert the date of creation in your database backup file name.

Click Save button and you are done!

Now that you've got backup of your database, let's learn how to restore your backup in case your database goes down.

Restoring a Backup

The full backup file is just a set of SQL statements, so restoring it is very easy. You can restore your backed up database by clicking on the restore backup icon .

The confirmation message will appear in the dashboard window to inform you that your database was restored.

Delete database backup

Sometimes you may be sure that you will not need one or more of your backups so you will decide to remove it from the list.

All that you have to do in that situation is to click on the delete icon on the right and reload your web page. Your database backup copy will be removed from the list and from your web server.

Please be sure that you have made a local copy and that you want to delete certain backup because Delete database button will delete it permanently!

Instead of you having to archive, delete and relate articles manually you can set your system to execute these actions for you. Cron is an automated task which automatically executes on a recurring basis allowing you to do some different tasks hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. It allows you to run commands at a specified date, time or at set intervals.

Vivvo allows you to automatically set your articles status to Archive or delete them after specified number of days. For example, you may archive all articles older than 30 days and delete all articles older than 100 days, just fill in the Auto archive and Auto delete fields.

We already said that in case you are using Related articles module you should relate articles from time to time. If this bothers you or you just forget to perform this action regularly you can simply set cron to relate your articles on a recurring basis.

Each cron task (archive, delete, relate) can be set separately and after setting all necessary fields for a task you should click on Save.

There is a special format for entering execution period for crontask:

Minute Hour Day Weekday Month (each must be separated by space)

For easier setting cron tasks there is a scheduler where you'll select when the cron for a job will execute. Just click on the Cron task icon and in a pop-up window you'll be able to choose minute, hour, day, weekday and month.

• Minute - Minute of the hour, 00 to 59.
• Hour = Hour of the day in 24-hour format, 00 to 23.
• Day = Day of the month, 1 to 31 (the job will not run if the day doesn't exist in the current month).
• Month = Month of the year, 1 to 12.
• Day = Day of the week, 0-6 (0 = Sunday, 6 = Saturday).

You have some predefined values but you may also define time that fits you best and schedule your cron executes as often as you need.

Example:

We want the cron to be executed every day at 2AM (every day/weekday and every month)

To help database clean up and get all the best possibilities to gather your information, you can perform the commands Optimize and Repair. You should perform this operation at least once a week.

Simply click Repair Database and/or Optimize Database links from the quick links menu on the left and performed actions reports will be displayed in the dashboard window on the right.

Use this option to (re)create a list of related articles. Related articles are cached to improve speed and reduce load on the server, so use this option often if you frequently add new articles.

Delete content of cache folder and cached content from your database with a single click.