How to Back Up the Twiki Site

A remote backup of the site can be accomplished by downloading /www/twiki/*.* . The twiki installation is custom on the server. The medhisto twiki is entirely self-contained in the medhisto data structure. It runs in a virtual server. That is, the medhisto twiki is not run in the root structure of the server.

So all of the content/preference/settings are backed up by downloading the "twiki" directory as outlined above. As you may know, UNIX file permissions are not preserved by Windows. A different server, however, is apt to require different persmissions anyway. The permissions would have to be set after an upload to a different server. You can zip the files remotely and download them to Window machine and preserve the permissions that way. Permissions are a routine characteristic of Unix/Linux. A twiki consultant would know what to do.

Installing the medhisto twiki on a hosting service will require, in the absence of my synaptic activities, consultation with the host provider. A dedicated co-localized server would be the best way. There are providers and consultants listed at twiki.org.

It cost me a few thousand dollars of personal money each year to carry on university business outside of the hmc firewall. But, if you start adding up consulting fees and co-localized servers with adequate storage, you can easily spend upwards of 20+ grand per year. At first glance it seems that you could do it for 15.95/mo. This just is not so.

Bottom line, to restore the site on a remote server would require the contents of /home/medhisto/www/twiki/*.* and a consultant who knows how to setup the content on a particular server configuration.

I am certainly friendly to preserving my contribution to the "education mission" at HMC despite my possible absence. But....., it will cost bucks to be mission critical.

There is nothing proprietary in any of the computing resources I have created. There is no low level code. Everything is open source. The tools are free. The synaptic interactions may not be.