Hi PEU,

Of course you can :-) You can duplicate your Piwigo directory and change the local/config/database.inc.php file to match the copy database.

In some cases, you may need to purge directory _data/templates_c too

Hi,
in case of a hard disk crash a replication of piwigo on the same server will not help :-)

In case of a server crash keep in mind that both databases (the one for the production site and the one for the replication) will probably on the same mysql server too.

For me the best backup stategy would be to keep the backup on a different hard disk /server.

What you could to to minimize the work if a crash happens:

1.
Download the complete piwigo files to your local computer with for example Filezilla.
You can set up Filezilla to download only changed and newer files - this way you only have to download all the files only one time.
All the next downloads will only download newer/changed files.

2.
Use a database backup tool like MysqlDumper to backup the database.
The version available at sourceforge work with newer myql/php versions.
If your server supports cron jobs you can set up a cron job to backup your database and let mysqldumper mail it to you.
I do backups on a daily base with a cron job.

I think this backup 'strategy' minimizes the work in case of a total crash.

Cheers
Ralf

As I write this I'm downloading a tar/gzip of the whole site + a sql dump of the database.
Since I'm the only one that has attributes to update the gallery and no users are allowed, my plan from now on is to add photos, upgrade plugins, etc and then make a new backup and dump it to my NAS at home.