How to organize backup copies of your project

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How to organize backup copies of your project

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A fundamental aspect of organizing a project is creating a backup copy of it.

Creating a backup copy of a project means creating a safety copy, to keep on your computer or on another storage device, as a safeguard against loss of the original.

If you have a backup copy of your project, you can safeguard yourself against:

Disaster recovery - recovering a project after fatal errors caused by events such as problems with your computer or the involuntary deletion of data.
Version recovery - creating copies that correspond to different versions of your project, so that you can, for example, cancel changes made in a work session and restore a backup copy of the version as it was before you made the changes.

For backup copies to be really useful, you need to be methodical and systematic in creating them.

WebSite X5 makes it very straightforward to create and manage backup copies of your projects, by providing the commands necessary for automatically generating backup copies and for restoring previous copies. As an alternative, it is also possible to manually create a backup copy and work on the list of previous backups. If the program detects a certain number of content types (objects in the pages, products in the shopping cart and/or posts in the blog) when the project is opened, it will display a window to remind you to make a backup copy and save the .IWZIP file, preferably on an external support. In this same window, you can indicate whether, and how often, this reminder is to be shown.

Click to expand/collapseVersion recovery - How to create an automatic backup copy

To automatically create a backup copy of your project, you need to:

open the project,
select the Create a Backup Copy when saving the Project the first time option in the Save menu,
alternatively, or at the same time, select the Create a Backup Copy every time you upload option in the Save menu.

If you select the Create a Backup Copy when saving the Project the first time option, a backup copy of the project is made when you save the project for the first time, whereas if you select the Create a Backup Copy every time you upload option, a backup copy is made before the website is published online.

All the backup copies that are created are added to the Backup List in the Backup Management window.

Click to expand/collapseVersion recovery - How to create a manual backup copy

As already mentioned, you can manually create a backup copy of your project. You have to:

open the project and make any necessary changes,
select the New Backup command in the Save window, making sure you give the backup copy an appropriate name so that you can easily identify it in the future.

All the backup copies that are created are added to the Backup List in the Backup Management window.

Click to expand/collapseVersion recovery - How to restore a backup copy of a project

To restore a backup copy of a project you have to:

select the project you want to work on in the Project Selection window;
click on the Backup... command to open the Backup Management window;
select the backup copy you want to restore from the Backup List and click on the Redo button.

The program substitutes the project with the backup copy and opens the Project Selection window, so you can open the restored copy and continue working.

Click to expand/collapseVersion recovery - How to set up automatic removal of old backup copies

If your project gets too big, it will take longer to open: to avoid this inconvenience, you should make sure all old backup copies are removed automatically:

Open the Project Selection window and select the project to work on, then click on the Backup... command to open the Backup Management window.
Select the Automatically remove backups after (days) option and specify the Minimum number of backup copies to keep, to ensure that not all the backup copies are deleted.
Click to expand/collapseDisaster recovery - How to make a backup copy of your project

If you want to make a backup copy of your project to keep on a separate storage device, you have to:

select Export the Project  in Step 5 - Export to export all the files linked to your project in a single compressed file (.IWZIP);
copy the .IWZIP file to the storage device you want to save the backup copy on.
Click to expand/collapseDisaster recovery - How to restore a backup copy of your project

If you want to restore a backup copy of your project that is stored on a separate storage device, you have to:

click on the Import... button in the Project Selection window to select the .IWZIP compressed file containing the project you want to restore;
select the restored project to open it and continue working on it.

 


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How to organize your projects