The Entire Site backup option is a welcome addition to this module. However, I am unclear why default/settings.php is listed in the files that are excluded from this backup. The settings file is often customised, so if I need to recover a site from this backup, I would expect this file to be part of it - and it would be a nasty shock to find it missing.

I imagine there are good reasons why it is excluded, but I suggest that this could be made more clear in the instructions and/or UI. For example, a help line below the list of excluded files/directories stating something like:

The default/settings.php file is one of the files that is excluded from an Entire Site backup. You should remove it from this list if you want to include it in your entire site backup.

Even better would be to remove it from the list, but add a checkbox to allow the user to specify whether to include that file in the backup or not.

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) CreditAttribution: Anonymous commented

why is it excluded?

panafff’s picture

panafff CreditAttribution: panafff commented

I am totally agree, this is a bad practice.

damban’s picture

damban CreditAttribution: damban commented

Agree.

I can manually zip and download public_html to my PC and it includes settings.php

If I use this module to do a full backup, it is excluded.

Just imagine you didn't know that, and made a mistake, deleted, and reinstalled from the -ahem- "backup".

Only to find settings.php is missing an gone forever.

ecupaio’s picture

ecupaio CreditAttribution: ecupaio commented

Oooh! I just did that. Now onto trying to recover my SQL db password

one_hoopy_frood’s picture

one_hoopy_frood CreditAttribution: one_hoopy_frood commented

I'm on:

7.x-3.1+11-dev

And this is still the default setting to not include default settings.php in the backup.

What was the rationale for doing this? Is there a use-case in which storing the default settings.php file would be bad?

couturier’s picture

couturier CreditAttribution: couturier as a volunteer commented

Can you verify if this is still an issue with the newest 7.x-3.2 release?

crystalgrafix’s picture

crystalgrafix CreditAttribution: crystalgrafix commented

I can confirm that this issue still exists with the .newest 7.x-3.2 release

DamienMcKenna’s picture

DamienMcKenna
Location NH, USA
CreditAttribution: DamienMcKenna at Mediacurrent commented
Category: Support request » Bug report

This is a bug from the POV that this file exclusion is never documented anywhere, sites could run into problems if this file wasn't backed up.

Ideally it should be managed by a setting.

dkronholm’s picture

dkronholm CreditAttribution: dkronholm commented

Still an issue apparantly. Just restored and found all sites to miss settings.php. Thank god for secondary backups :)

BrankoC’s picture

BrankoC CreditAttribution: BrankoC as a volunteer commented

What was the rationale for doing this?

I have been trying to find out, but this functionality seems to have sprung fully grown from the head of Zeus when the file 'includes/destinations.archivesource.inc' was added (which later became 'includes/sources.archivesource.inc').

Is there a use-case in which storing the default settings.php file would be bad?

I don't know what would happen if you restored into an existing installation (which seems to be the default restoration method). Would the settings.php be overwritten? Often that file is write-protected; what would happen then?

The module can also be used for migration; presumably you wouldn't want to overwrite the original DB (which might happen if you managed to restore settings.php).

solideogloria’s picture

solideogloria CreditAttribution: solideogloria commented

I would assume it's excluded for the same reason it should be excluded from git repositories.

BrankoC’s picture

BrankoC CreditAttribution: BrankoC as a volunteer commented

Good point. That reason is presumably security, because you end up storing login data (for the production database server) in lots of back-ups.

solideogloria’s picture

solideogloria CreditAttribution: solideogloria commented

Shall we close this as "works as designed"?

DamienMcKenna’s picture

DamienMcKenna
Location NH, USA
CreditAttribution: DamienMcKenna at Mediacurrent commented
Title: Entire site backup excludes default/settings.php file » Provide advanced option to modify the excluded files/directories
Category: Bug report » Feature request

Let's make this a feature request to allow controlling the files/directories which are normally excluded.