Chapter 15. Backup, Maintenance, and Upgrades

Backup and maintenance procedures are among the more onerous tasks of maintaining a website. These procedures are detail oriented, and they require a level of geek-like work that many people simply don't enjoy. Additionally, many users have the expectation that a website, once set up, will run by itself.

Unfortunately, just about everything in life—a car, a computer, a relationship, or a website—requires work to run smoothly. In this chapter, we will go over the steps that you need to take to keep your site safe and secure.

The instructions in this chapter are intended for teachers running a site to support their classes, or for a technology department at a small school—for example, for people running under ten sites overall. For larger Drupal installations, or for people developing applications using Drupal, I strongly recommend a more complex support structure using a version control system (CVS, svn, git, bazaar, and so on).

In this chapter,...