Once everything is up and running smooth on the drupal site it is time for the warm fuzzy feeling of backups. Naturally, everyone has their own way of doing things and mine is to use a script called AutoMySQLBackup in conjunction with Duplicity and Amazon S3.

So what does this exactly do?

AutoMySQLBackup runs to take a dump of the database everyday and store the resulting files on the server. This gives me a complete snapshot of the database sitting on the server waiting to get backed up.

Duplicity takes care of compressing and securely transferring these database snapshots (as well as all other website files) offsite. In this case I decided to use Amazon S3 for offsite storage. Duplicity has a built-in protocol to transfer these files directly to Amazon S3 and makes it pretty simple.

AutoMySQLBackup

There are many times, for one reason or another, that I need to transfer a Drupal website from one server to another. I was used to using tools like Filezilla and phpMyAdmin to get most of the heavy lifting done, but after doing this many times I've found the command line to be my friend.

I use linode.com so I know how my server is configured, what's installed, and more importantly have shell access. If you use a shared host this guide/checklist probably won't help you out too much.

To prep the site I do a couple of quick changes:

• Set to offline mode to prevent any more changes taking place in the database
• Turn off caching/compressing mechanisms and flush all caches

Once those are done, here are the steps I use to transfer the site:

In my case the folder structure is usually set to something like the following:

I've been using Drupal for quite a while (since verion 4.x) both as a hobby and building websites for clients.

Most of the stuff I've done has been configuration of available modules coupled with my own personal module and theme tweaks, but never anything public to the community. Now I've decided to get more involved and am the co-maintainer (along with CrookedNumber) of a new kiva module that aims to integrate Drupal with the Kiva API.

Currently, we have a block module that can be configured to display loans based on settings the user provides as well as an add-on parser module to Feedapi (which I'm really excited about). We're still in the initial development stage, so if anyone has ideas or feature requests please let us know.