Hi,

Just sharing some thoughts on how to keep your Piwigo backed up and synchronised to your local PC. This can be a really good way to run backups regularly and only copy over files that have altered or been added.

What is even cooler, is that you can create batch files to double click that will start the process, and you can then use scheduler on the PC to start these backups automatically.

I'll also mention software that will make backups of your Piwigo database at the end.

Ok, so the first software you need is FreeFileSync

https://freefilesync.org/

It is free! you basically give it the FTP details and select where on your PC you want to keep copies of your piwigo files and do a compare to start with, then synchronise. It will copy over the files to your PC. Next time you run it, you hit synchronise and it will check the files on the server and only copy over added or amended files.

If you have Cpanel, what I did was to create different FTP accounts for different folders, so one for the upload folder, one for the folder for physical albums and one for the site files. When you set up Free file sync for site files, you can exclude the image folders, so it only copies the actual site files. You could of course, just copy everything and do it that way.

The only disadvantage, is that the free version is a single thread copy only, in other words only copies a single file at a time. If you donate to the software (very much recommended) it will allow you to copy several files at once (adjust in the settings). This makes it a whole stack faster.

I can now do backups of a 7000 image gallery in a minute or so, as it's only copying the new stuff daily.

Can't recommend this enough. You can also set it up so that you can mirror the other way, so if there's a big problem you can restore from the PC.

Database Backup

I use this software

https://sqlbackupandftp.com/

Which you can use to connect to your Cpanel and download backup files of your database. The free version allows 1 database only, and that's enough for me. Various options including compressing the database, and you can create a restore batch file as well as a backup batch. Again, this can also be scheduled to run on a PC automatically.