August 21, 2007
Dreamhost Hourly Backups Saved My Blog Theme
The other night I deleted by blog theme by accident and did not have a recent version backed up. Very frustrated with myself for the mistake, I went onto the dreamhost (my hosting) wiki to look up how to restore data. It turns out that they do hourly backups and the wiki gave me instructions on how to accomplish this using WebFTP.
You can either access WebFTP from the Dreamhost Panel or directly by going to http://webftp.dreamhost.com. Enter the address of your ftp server, username, password and for the initial directory you want to type: “/.snapshot” (no quotes).
Next, select who version of the site you would like to browse through. Available Options: Hourly, Nightly, Weekly. On the right (out of picture) is the dates when the snapshot was taken.
Finally choose which folder(s), file(s) you would like to restore. Once you check off the ones you need, you can either download them or zip them onto the server.
Backup is not always available, it is just a feature that usually occurs as a benefit. Dreamhost is not the best hosting out there, but for the price I pay each year and the options it gives me, it works just great. I am on my second year of hosting and I have only had a few downtimes and rarely any problems.
