Thread

I preparation to doing the 1.6.3 upgrade, I decided to back up my database. After spending 20 minutes looking under every conceivable tab (and some that weren’t) I resorted to looking through the docs. I read this:

The built-in ExpressionEngine Database Backup utility has been removed as of version 1.6.2.

Umm, why? Seemed such an easy and nice way to do it before, and without the backup of at least one install (a pmachine install actually) I would have lost the text of a years worth of posting. Now, anyone who’s read my blog wouldn’t mourn such a loss, the person writing it would.

Why take this away?

Now I have to figure out how to do it through my hosting service. But after looking under every conceivable tab (and some that weren’t) I….

Yeah, I just don’t know why EE would take this away.

oh, and guessing this is why the EE site was down the other day.

I delayed upgrading to 1.6.2 in part because of that change, but there’d been a few occasions where I’d needed to use my host’s SQL backup utility instead anyway, so I did finally upgrade.

Look in your host’s control panel for phpMyAdmin. Select the database you use for EE, click “Export,” and check “Save As File.” If you want the download zipped, you should have a selection of radio buttons for compression so as to choose your preferred format.

If that isn’t applicable for your situation, try posting who your host is, and then maybe someone else who uses them will be able to talk you through it.

Edit (next day) to Add: The last several successful DB backups I did using the EE utility were, I believe, non-zipped. I then made zip archives out of them once I had them on my system. Once I discovered the first bad backup a couple of years ago, and resumed using the EE utility afterward, I periodically checked the backups to be sure they were good.

In the end I found that the compressed version of the backup couldn’t be counted on, but the plain-text SQL file could.

But that was just me. As noted on the other thread Lisa links in the comment after this one, apparently others with different host configs had more serious problems.

You can read this thread about why that utility was removed. =)