First of all, sorry that WRD had a downtime (around 8 hours) yesterday.

The post: 27 Adobe AIR Applications – Handy For Web Designers got pretty popular in most of the social-bookmarking / voting websites. I realized that the website was getting slower & about to take action on it. Then the post moved to frontpage at digg.com & I was not able to reach to server anymore.

As the server was not responding, rebooted from the power-strip several times, got ping results but after sometime, reboots weren’t pinging.

Thanks to the hosting company that they reached the server & told that the server was not able to boot because of corrupt system file errors (confirmed via KVM).

A fresh OS is installed & they added the previous harddisk as a secondary one so I could get the data.

After setting up the server, here it is, WRD is back online.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t underestimate the digg effect, it is really strong.
• Don’t reboot a server via power-strip (several times).
• Backup frequently (I’m good at this from past experiences).
• Apply all of your own tips.
• And maybe it is because the server is Windows, think about that.. : )

Hope that this post may help you to stay online.

There are projects which I’m using Subversion and some that I don’t. There are also other things which are very valuable to me like bookmarks, code snippets & more.

And every designer, developer, for sure, lost a few days work because of not backing up the files regularly.

I have started using Mozy Online Backup Free version as a backup solution for my dev. files in general. It provides 2GB space for free, very easy to configure, can take scheduled backups and works silently.

It is an impressive product as it totally reduces the risk of losing data. And works both in Windows and Mac.

There are also other versions of Mozy:

• Mozy Free – 2GB – free – personal use
• Mozy Home – unlimited space ($4.95/month)
• Mozy Pro & Mozy Enterprise with more features like SQL or server backup

P.S. This post is an advertorial (and I really like the product ).

MySQL restore is sometimes a bad experience if the database size is bigger than the allowed limit or the execution time of the restore script is not enough. Users generally restore databases with desktop softwares or through the command line in such situations.

MySQLDumper is a backup & restore management script for MySQL Databases, written in PHP and Perl, which fills this gap and offers a complete control over the databases.

MySQLDumper uses a proprietary technique to avoid execution interruption. It only reads and saves a certain amount of commands and then calls itself via JavaScript and memorizes how far in the process it was and resumes its action from its last standby.

MySQLDumper offers to write data directly into a compressed gz-File. The Restore-Script is able to read this file directly without unpacking it. Of course you can use it without compression, however using Gzip saves a sizeable amount of bandwidth.

Users can get e-mail notifications after the automated backup process:

Features

• MySQLDumper can read dumpfiles from other scripts via the integrated parser (for example from phpMyAdmin).
• Security: MySQLDumper can generate a .htaccess-file to protect itself and all of your backup-files.
• MySQLDumper can do multipart-backups. That means: MySQLDumper can automatically split the dumpfile if it gets bigger than your chosen size. When you want to restore a backup and choose the wrong part – it doesn’ matter: MySQLDumper will notice that and will get the correct start file automatically.
• Automatic error module.
• MiniSql: You have access to your MySQL-Tables. You can delete tables, edit or insert data. You can run/ save any SQL-statement.
• Database-overview: look at running processes or even stop them.
• Very good file-overview: backups of the same database are shown as one entry. Click it to see all of the files.
• Automatic file-deletion: set your own rules to delete old backups. Specify the age or the number of files when it will be deleted automatically to save server webspace.
• Perl cron script: all features of the PHP-Script are now integrated in the Perl script that can be started via a cron job.
• Configuration can be set seperatly for each script (PHP and Perl).
• Before you start a backup all your parameters are shown again, so you definitely know what you are doing.
• Send e-mails with or without your dump file attached / you can set the maximum size of the attachement. If it grows bigger it won’t be attached.
• Send dumpfiles via FTP to another server. This is also working using the multipart feature.