Backup strategy

[stevehParticipant]

I’ve been thinking about my site backup strategy now I have a lot of images there. The database and associated config files are no problem – I use UpdraftPlus for that. But the images themselves are more complex.

Am I right in saying that the original files are renamed and stored in ss_media, and that the thumbnails are stored in wp-content/uploads/2015/08 etc.? Are files for download at the different sizes generated on the fly when someone actually buys one?

If so, then I need to have a copy of all the images in ss_media and also the various upload folders because my originals on my hard drive aren’t named the same way. If I had to rebuild the site for any reason, I would have to reload all the images in those folders with their appropriate file names for the site to be back to normal.

Steve

My stock site
Symzio agency

[RobinKeymaster]

Good news is all you need is ss_media and the database. Since Symbiostock has a robust and quick thumbnail regenerator built in, all you have to do is re-upload your watermark or change its percentage slightly and it will automatically regenerate all your thumbnails.

You may have other things in the uploads directory you want to save, but the thumbnails are certainly not at all necessary for Symbiostock.

[stevehParticipant]

Thanks Robin! I wrote a “how-to” article on my blog about backing up the new Symbiostock site and the approach I followed on my blog:

http://www.backyardsilver.com/2015/08/how-to-backup-your-symbiostock-photo-agency-website/

It may help other people and it made sense to me!

Steve

My stock site
Symzio agency

[RobinKeymaster]

Wow that’s massive! Maybe we’ll add stuff like this and link to your blog in our FAQ. Very thorough.

Couple of things:

1) Yes, Symbiostock generates the proper image size on the fly when a customer downloads your image
2) One additional ‘backup’ system is to have metadata saving always enabled on your images. This way, if everything were to go down, at least all your keywording, titling, and descriptions would be stored in your raw images. In fact, if that were to happen and you had to start fresh, other than categories, a majority of your work would still be preserved (even URLs would match since they are usually generated from your titles).

And finally, one other feature of Symbiostock 2.0 is it imports categories (as per your request) so now it will either look for the category and add it to it, or create a new one when it is processed. You can have multiple categories in this regard as well. It does not write categories back to the files (yet), but nevertheless, with categories and all the other data, through Symbiostock metadata writing your images act as a secondary backup system for all your work as well.

[stevehParticipant]

Thanks Robin – I often write these things for myself as I struggle to remember what I did and why later!

I agree about the metadata in the files – all my jpegs have those items in the file, but I deliberately altered the descriptions on a lot of my earlier uploads to make them more unique and descriptive (different to the same image on Shutterstock, for instance). So the database becomes critical for reloading the site unless Symbiostock in future writes the new information into the images that have already been uploaded. I guess that would give an extra layer of security. Perhaps I am misunderstanding though – is this feature already available through a setting and I have missed it?

Steve

 

My stock site
Symzio agency

[RobinKeymaster]

Yes – metadata writing is already a setting. I believe it is disabled by default, but you can see it in the Symbiostock settings. You can enable or disable it on a per image basis too, so if you change the description and don’t want that one with the agencies, disable it on the image.

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