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I am currently on contract with a small (<250 accounts) municipal water supply company. One of the things I'm doing is rewriting their ten-years-out-of-date procedures manual, and after some discussion with the company's president and with the treasurer, I settled on a localhost MediaWiki install.

The problem I'm currently having is with a backup of the wiki. (The monitor of the laptop currently hosting the wiki began to fail this week, which moved data backup to the front of my priorities.) I can certainly back it up, and I know how to restore it from backup. However, this contracting job is not a permanent placement, and eventually the office manager(s) would be responsible for it. However, they are not especially tech savvy, and the MediaWiki backup instructions involve options like command-line tools, which are not things they are particularly interested in learning.

Is there any way I can simplify the backup & restore process (in particular, the database backup; I am confident the managers can handle files if need be)?

The computer running the localhost wiki is a laptop with Windows 10, running XAMPP (Apache 2.4.17, MySQL 5.0.11, PHP 5.6.21)

(Repost from SO after realizing this question is off-topic there.)

Brian S
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    First of all, what is the wiki going to _actually_ run on? – Michael Hampton Sep 18 '16 at 16:07
  • I think you need to revisit "I settled on a localhost MediaWiki install". Your problem sounds more like "I don't have the proper hardware to operate a MediaWiki installation, and I don't have anyone to manage it.". – thexacre Sep 18 '16 at 19:41
  • A backup procedure is not the best place for amateurs to start learning web server administration. Errors in the backup procedure will only be discovered when someone tries to restore from backups, and that typically happens in situations where you really don't want to discover errors. IMO you are better off setting them up with a wiki on some cloud, with automated backups. – Tgr Sep 18 '16 at 21:10
  • @Tgr, the company president does not want the manual available online, which is where the localhost part came in. – Brian S Sep 19 '16 at 14:45
  • Well, as a consultant it's you job to talk your clients out of stupid ideas :) – Tgr Sep 19 '16 at 23:18

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All required information is here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki

Basically, your best bet for a non-tech maintainer will be to set up something automatic that has an easy means of getting confirmation that the backup is correct. Which really means the automatic backup should also implement an automatic restore, preferably on another computer. Then, to test the backup, the non-tech person just needs to check to see that recent changes (including uploaded files) have propagated to the restore location.

It's a good idea to not only back up the database and files, but also to do an XML export of the wiki.

Sam Wilson
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  • Automatic operation (nobody remembers to do such things manually as long as everything works fine from their eyes), confirmation of success (instead of failure, which can fail silently), and testing the restore without stress are the 3 main points one should take to heart. Good answer. – user121391 Sep 22 '16 at 06:58