Miva hosting backup practicies?

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Hi folks, thanks for the suggestions.

Yes, we could just copy the entire DB, but it's pretty big, and I'm a little concerned about having the client pay extra every month for the hard-drive space.

The reason for the deletion is that the store had some problems with the checkout pages for several years, As a result, there are thousands of customer accounts in there for people who never actually placed an order -- or maybe they did, but the data got lost, so that the account isn't linked to any orders. We want to get rid of those.

Thanks --

The space consumed in the database from customer records is perhaps a kilobyte or less per customer, so deleting them solely to save disk space would not likely do much; even 10,000 customers would probably net you 5 MB of storage. If their presence is causing performance issues, we'd likely to look into that to determine why, because normally it shouldn't.

I would recommend that if you do want to remove them, don't want to dev site it (since that would double the disk usage), and NEED to keep their encrypted passwords versus doing a customer export which would not include passwords, then you could just back up the s0x_Customers database table. You could always export it as SQL and CSV, and use the most appropriate one later on if the data is needed, including to put back into Merchant (from the SQL file)

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Also, it recently came to my attention that some types of data that aren't in the DB, such as the privatekeys.dbf file, are not backed up as often. There are other files on the server, in the script or data folders, that have valuable information in them. Is any of this data included in backups?

Basically,I was wondering if I could get a complete description of the backup policy in one place. Which files, and how often?

Thanks --

Backups are nightly and the retention varies but is minimum three weeks, typically more. There are some behind the scenes things happening now related to backups that may increase retention time much more.

Regarding 'not backed up as often', that is not the case. Our backups are for everything on a given server, there's not a difference based on file or data type.

[Kent Multer]

Hi folks, thanks for the suggestions.

Yes, we could just copy the entire DB, but it's pretty big, and I'm a little concerned about having the client pay extra every month for the hard-drive space.

The reason for the deletion is that the store had some problems with the checkout pages for several years, As a result, there are thousands of customer accounts in there for people who never actually placed an order -- or maybe they did, but the data got lost, so that the account isn't linked to any orders. We want to get rid of those.

Thanks --

[alphabet]

What is the benefit of doing deletions?

...maybe assign them to a pricegroup named inactive?

Or have you seen the Consolidate Customers module?

http://apps.miva.com/consolidate-customers.html

[SunCam]

Why not copy everything to a dev site before doing the deletions?

[Kent Multer]

Hi Rick, thanks for clarifying that. Suppose my client wants to keep a backup for longer than 3 weeks? Is there a convenient way to make longer-term backups? At the moment, the client is mainly just concerned about customer accounts, which means they need to save the Customers table, and a few related ones such as address-book entries. I could export those tables into files and take them off the server with FTP, but it seems like there might be a better way?

Thanks --

[Rick Wilson]

As a rule we can go back about 3 weeks. It's all files and databases.

[Kent Multer]

Hi folks,

One of my clients wants me to delete a lot of old customer accounts from their store. But they asked about keeping a backup copy of the data, in case they want to restore the accounts, use the email addresses for marketing, etc. I know that Miva makes regular backups of the entire store DB. I'm pretty sure they do this every night, but I don't know how long they keep them around.

Also, it recently came to my attention that some types of data that aren't in the DB, such as the privatekeys.dbf file, are not backed up as often. There are other files on the server, in the script or data folders, that have valuable information in them. Is any of this data included in backups?

Basically,I was wondering if I could get a complete description of the backup policy in one place. Which files, and how often?

Thanks --