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Backing Up Your Site

There are two approaches to backing up a Backlight site:

  • A minimal approach, for sites where albums and photos are entirely managed by Lightroom
  • A complete backup, for sites where albums and photos are managed from the Backlight admin page, or as a more robust backup strategy for Lightroom users.

Minimal Approach​

For users managing albums and photos entirely from Lightroom, it is not necessary to back up your albums or album sets from the web server. Your images, their metadata, and album settings including title, description, page copy, etc. all exist within your Lightroom catalog, in your Publish Services collections, and will be included in your catalog backup.

It is also unnecessary to back up the installed Backlight application from your website. The latest versions of Backlight and its add-ons are always available to be downloaded from The Turning Gate, either via your order email or via order retrieval.

You should back up these folders from your website:

  • backlight/custom
  • backlight/data

The /custom folder contains your personalizations, if any. The /data folder contains Backlight's settings, templates, etc.

If blogging on WordPress, then back up your WordPress database separately from Backlight.

If using Backlight's WordPress Add-on, there is no need to back up your theme. Otherwise, do back up your WordPress theme, or any child theme (whether based on Backlight's add-on or not).

Restoring from Backup​

To restore a site from Backlight, you should:

  • Install a fresh copy of Backlight's latest version, and any add-ons.
  • Restore your backed up folders, backlight/custom and backlight/data.
  • Reconnect the Publisher plugin via API address and key.
  • In Lightroom, visit every Album Set from the top down, right clicking each, clicking Edit Album Set and then 'Edit'. The process of editing and saving re-creates the Album Sets on the server.
  • Do the same for all Albums within Album Sets or at the top-level of your Publisher instance.
  • Re-publish your photos.

Complete Backup​

This option provides a complete backup of your site. This is a simple approach, but may be time-consuming when large numbers of albums and photos have been uploaded to your site.

To perform a complete backup:

  • With your FTP software, make a complete copy from your web server to your PC of all Backlight directories. These should include:
    • The backlight directory
    • Any gallery directories, such as galleries
    • The top-level index.php and .htacccess files

The backlight/modules directory can be omitted, as these directories can be reinstalled if needed.

To save time, use an FTP application that can synchronize the contents of directories, so that in subsequent backups, only new or changed files will need to be copied from your web server to your PC.

Restoring from a Complete Backup​

Restoring your site can be done with the following steps:

  • With your FTP software, copy back all files and directories that you had backed up, from your PC to your web server.
  • If you had not backed up the backlight/modules directory, then visit /backlight/installer and complete a reinstallation of Backlight.