Hi, Knowing that you complete a full backup every day is reassuring however reading through this post it seems that if for whatever reason there was a catastrophic loss you would only be able to restore the website from your previous days back up. Looking at this post: https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/16759168-backup-restore-events it seems that we would lose all our event data including forthcoming events. The website is one thing, but for us to lose all the events data would be disastrous. Not having the ability to restore data ourselves isn't a great problem to me, so far your support team have proved to be very responsive and if entire site's have been lost I'm sure you would looking at restoring them as a priority. But can you offer some assurance that all the event data could be recovered if necessary? Thanks

It is unbelievable that WA does not provide a comprehensive backup feature (both for data for the website). Your customers need and deserve a comprehensive one step, date in time backup that is easily performed by volunteers that are not it savvy. If an organization makes daily backups the current multistep process almost guarantees mistakes will happen over time and that the only way you will know if you have backed up what you need is when you try to restore. This is truly unacceptable and is not in keeping with what I have come to expect from Wild Apricot.

I will grant that setting up WebDAV to transfer files (resembling an FTP transfer) is not as scary as it first seems. Also, it has an advantage over downloading files via a browser, because it retains timestamps and file architecture.

But backing up thoroughly on a regular schedule still involves a rabbit warren of tools and procedures.

To back up our website, our Contacts, images, and other data, Wild Apricot advises using a rabbit-warren of methods that includes special installation and understanding of third-party services. For our volunteer organization, where we change jobholders every year or two, that is just not practical and puts us at risk.

WA itself backs up our entire system in case of a catastrophe, but it's not available to the WA customer (which is understandable). We need essentially the same capability to do this ourselves, routinely and without extraordinary effort. We'll figure out where to store the data. Given the overall WA service concept, your omission of this -- and all the rube goldberg workarounds -- is NOT understandandable.

By the way, even with the various backup methods advised, none of them backs up Saved Searches and manual email Templates. What else in our system is at risk? We don't even know.

There is another thread wishing for this. It has surprisingly few votes, even though it dates back to 2008. But that wish's headline mentions only "website." That's the least of our concerns. And, as everybody knows, backup is always a neglected user issue, even though it is among the most essential concerns. WA should provide this capability as a matter of professional service, not wait for customers to vote who never will.

Because we have other things to prioritize, with more votes on them.

A full backup system is much more a need than any shop. Why has this not been prioritised?

I'm not an export on backup & restore options but I think a valuable option for us novices would be a single place an Admin can go to do a scheduled backup of all of our member data and event data.
I see several export all data and load features. So it appears the data can be backed up and reloaded. But it needs to be done in several places and is not so easy to remember to do all the multiple steps. Plus the typical, out of site out of mind problem.
If you can have a single place that we could go to click export all data and events and then if needed load all data. I think that would be a step in the right direction.
I understand that it would be a lot of work to have the ability to backup all of our content, with the ability to reload it. It is something that I hope I never have to deal with but I now know I will have to rebuild if that happens.

Would having a backup without possibility to restore it be interesting? Because importing a backup backup is much harder to implement.

This capability is table stakes for any IT implementation. And now I see it has been hanging around, un-actioned, since 2008?
For shame.

As a soon to be new user, I also want to cast another vote in favor of a backup, preferably with restore. At a minimum, give us a feature/method to request a restore from your (Wild Apricot) systems backups.

Thanks.

Hi,

Want to cast another vote in favor of whole site & data backup with restore.

Thanks.

That is not an answer to the question i asked!

The question I asked was:

Will you make available the facility to do a full website backup & restore???

Or do we have to consider alternative solutions.

If you ask the question on your "Help" section you get this answer:

"We automatically back up all Wild Apricot accounts on a daily basis and store the backups at a location separate from our data center. These backups protect your data from catastrophic threats to our data center, and can be used to restore lost data only in the case of emergency. These backups are not available to clients."

Did you try to contact our support? We could have helped you to restore your content.

Re timeline: we were focusing on something else.

This Subject was started in 2008 it is now 7 years since this question of Website backup was raised.

Why have you not provided a Backup & restore facility yet???.

I would have thought that 7 years would have been more than enough time for your software technicians to create a backup & restore facility for the users of your software.

We recently had a disgruntled webmaster who before resigning from being webmaster completely destroyed our website, moved all the pages into the trash bin then emptied it. We were left with a website with no content.

It has taken me & a few others 3 months to rebuild our website completely from scratch.

Will you ever provide a backup & restore facility that we can do ourselves???

If you cannot or will not provide this facility, do we have to consider moving away from WA to building & hosting our our own website where we will have complete control over full backup & restore.

Wild Apricot team,

I understand from your website that you perform daily back-ups, but that these back-ups are not available to clients. (https://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Backing+up+your+data )
Is there a reason why it's not possible to offer site or data restoration for a one-time fee to those who find themselves in the situation of needing it? Please consider making such a service available.

thanks!

Alumni Group

Sorry to hear about your accident. No, nothing changed in version 5 and we're not working on backup feature right now. See this thread about our plans and current progress - http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8827717-roadmap-2015-plans-releases-expected-dates

In this long discussion topic we've discussing what specifically people need from backup feature. Is it just

a) having a way to somehow download all the information in order to keep some copy on our own servers, but without restoring ability

b) or is it also about restoring, so you're not just backing up, but can restore from it too.

The difference is very big from implementation point of view. Doing A is much faster and easier, but has no real purpose except keep data on our computers and being able to manually open files and copy/paste data.

Option B is much more time consuming for us to design and develop.

We are relatively new to Wild Apricot. We have one site live and two more under construction going live by the end of this month. We love the application and are working with the new version which looks great. We accidentally deleted our contacts last month on our live site--too many sites opened at one time. The only option we had was to request a restore of the data through 2nd tier support which took 24 hours and did not restore all the data. I know there are ways to backup the data but it appears to be labor intensive, not complete and not practical for regular backup. Has anything changed in 5.0? I know this topic has been around for a while so wanted to see if anything has changed. Some of the associations we are working with are financial institutions and are concerned about data backup. John

I'll keep this in mind - we will update our procedures against aliens invasion (last time we hardly managed)

Backup-only is a big step in the right direction, if we know we can trust it. That would require only a beta with trusted customers who can assure us that our content is indeed backed up.

I would want to download a copy of the backup, even if I cannot use it, this is for compliance reasons. Besides, if WA's headquarters gets blown away by alien spaceships, I still have my data to give to the rebels to get us back online and save the the universe from Certain Destruction.

(I hate when that happens!)

Does it have any benefit, if there is only backup option (more like export - images, web content, etc.), but no import / restore back? The problem is that to have both is quite a substantial chunk of work and it's not clear yet when we're going to do something about this.