Tech question

[csa]

My harddrive needs some work. Is it possible to backup my website to a different machine while the work is being done?

[dryicerx]

... the question is very vague, some more specifics would help.

The harddisk where/what/why? are you hosting the site on your computer by your self and the disk is in it?
Unless you're working on a disk on your web server, I don't see how it related to your website at all.

[Flea77]

While more information would be very helpful, the answer is most likely yes. If the hard drive is in a remote server you can FTP in and download the website to your local drive before work begins. If you are on the machine that has the web server you can just back it up to a thumb drive or external hard drive before you work on the drive.

One word of caution, as vague as your question is I would strongly recommend you get someone with a little more knowledge of how the server works and what all needs to be backed up before you proceed. For example, do you have any CGI, Java or SSI that needs to be backed up too?

Allan

[csa]

Thanks. No, I am not the hosting server, so yes, I FTP to an online server. I understand just enough about web maintenance to be dangerous with no one to really step in to answer questions as needed. The purchased template and folders are on my drive, and I just wanted to make sure that I could either save a backup or FTP in and download what I have to a different location without having to rebuild it all from scratch if I loose everything on my end. My husband said he needs me to save what I want to keep because he plans to wipe my harddrive and reinstall the programs which sounds ominous to me. He is a hardware techie with little to no knowlege about web or FTP. Why? It is supposed to fix the wonkiness I keep having everytime I run PS3. It is at least making me get a better backup plan for all my pics, but the whole thing is scary to me.

[KenJulio]

So the files on your harddrive are exact duplicates as to what you have on your web server?

If this is the case, yes, copying the files to an external harddrive. The directory structure will be different as there may be 1 or 2 extra directories as to where your files are.

For instance if you have your templates/web files on c:\data\web
On the external harddrive, assuming you copied the data directory, will look like this: <letter of your external harddrive>:\data\web

I recommend storing your personal data on a separate partition from your operating system partition. Either on an external harddrive or a separate partition, the partition can be created if your husband is reinstalling the OS.

Just my opinion of course :)

[csa]

Thank you. I would never really go back to film, but sometimes the nuances of technology elude me. I'll pass along the idea. He will probably already plan for such.

[plph56]

By the sounds of it you should actually be backing up more regularly to some sort of external zip or hard drive just in case the unforseen happens and your computer crashes.

That is the problem with digital photography as opposed to film photography.