Last night I had the wonderful experience of restoring a website (2 separate sites 1 ASP.net and 1 DNN) from the Hosting Wwebsite Backup feature. In over two years while hosting with NetSol, I've never had to do this. Luckily this was one of my smaller websites (only about 110MB).

One thing that I found is that the backup is an archive of all deleted files since the Backup feature was enabled. I mistakenly assumed that the backup was a copy just the way the website looked the previous day. This was not the case.

Here is the problem I experienced.

I use to have an index.html in my root website folder. I've since moved to a default.aspx page as my website start page. Almost 6 months ago I deleted the index.html file. I have never looked back, until I tried to pull up my site last night after the restore and there was my index.html file again. All I had to do was re-delete the file and my site worked file. This has caused me to want to investigate the backup tools further so that I know what they do and how I can best utilize them in an emergency.

I hope someone from the NetSol team could explain the Website Backup procedure (i.e. backup performs on changed files, new files, deleted files, etc.) and the best practices for restoring a website.

I also plan to look into the SQL Server Database Backup files more in depth to see if these are really sufficient in the event of database failure. Any advice from the NetSol team on this would be great.


Charles Self
Narrow Gate Solutions
www.narrowgatesolutions.com
dotnetnuke.narrowgatesolutions.com - DNN Related Resources

The backup procedure that is used is a differential backup. This means that it when it creates the restore points it updates the backups with only the files that have changed for that day (it doesn't delete files that have been removed). Occasionally a new FULL backup is done that is pretty much a snapshot of your website, but to save on time and system resources the majority of backups that are done are differential.

This would cause the symptom you reported, of having some of the files restored that have been deleted since the last full backup. Unfortunately at this time there is no way to check to see when the last FULL backup was done.