Getting Ready to Break My Websites

I've been a bad Drupal website administrator. I have ignored update after update on my own site Spice Ridge and Pocahontas County History. They are minor, fiddly updates, but I've put them off again and again. However, now something is broken on one of these sites. It doesn't have to do with Drupal, but I'm going to have to go into repair mode anyway, so I guess I might as well update Drupal now. Why not break everything all at once?

First, I need local installations to test stuff before I start breaking Websites out in public. My original local installations were vaporized when my last Linux box fried its cpu and hard drive in April of 2009, and because I messed up my Debian Lenny and switched to Kubuntu, I need to set up Apache2, PHP5, MySql, and PHPMyAdmin from scratch in order to rassle with Drupal. It turns out my collection of links on setting up a Debian server from my initial Drupal adventure is still up-to-date. This process goes surprisingly quickly this time.

The next step is to download the Drupal installations (and the broken Archon CMS as well). I'll just ftp the files to my localhost directories, but I also need to recreate the MySQL databases locally, and I don't remember how to do that.

• How to backup your Mysql database with phpMyAdmin. This worked like a charm, but phpMyAdmin balked at importing the .sql file into my local database--it said my file was too large. Well, I was once an old hand at command-line sql interactions, but I couldn't remember syntax....
• How to restore MySQL database from sql dump file? gave me the directions I needed:

  rebecca@hecate:/var/www/spiceridge$ mysql -u root -p spiceridge < spicerid_dp.sql
  Enter password:
  rebecca@hecate:/var/www/spiceridge$
  

  This creates all the tables I needed, as well as populating them. Pretty slick.

In the process of doing all this, I discover that my hosting service's new setup has a nifty, easy-to-use backup utility that handles files, scripts and databases in a single step, eliminating the time-consuming process I just completed for my Spice Ridge website. Oh well, it'll really help when I start on the local history site.

Here's some stuff I found about Drupal updates and back-ups. I haven't tried any of this yet, but I'm saving it here so I don't misplace it.

• Upgrading from previous versions
• HowTo: Updating Drupal 6.x to newer minor version
• Drupal Backup and Migrate Module

  Backup and Migrate simplifies the task of backing up and restoring your Drupal database or copying your database from one Drupal site to another. It supports gzip, bzip and zip compression as well as automatic scheduled backups.

  With Backup and Migrate you can dump some or all of your database tables to a file download or save to a file on the server, and to restore from an uploaded or previously saved database dump. You can chose which tables and what data to backup and cache data is excluded by default.