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When managing a website, especially a social network, it is mandatory to create a backup in its working condition on a regular basis. This will ensure that you will not lose any data or member due to any kind of failure.
There are two ways to create a backup of your Dolphin community. The first one is using the built-in feature of the script that allows you to create a backup of your database. The other option is create a full backup of both the files and the database associated with your website. We will now explain how to use both of them.
Built-in Dolphin Backup/Restore feature:
To generate a backup of your database you should first access the dashboard of the website and navigate to Tools > Database Backup:
On the page where you will be redirected to you can specify the type of data you want to backup and the place to be stored. Actually you have the option to copy only a certain table of the database or the whole one. We recommend to generate a full backup of the database to avoid any issues. In our example we will generate a backup of the whole Dolphin database on our local machine:
In case that you need to restore the website database to a previous state for which you have a backup you need to navigate again to Tools > Database Backup > Database Backup Tools and select the file you want to deploy:
As you can see you can choose to either use a database dump file stored on the server or such downloaded on your local computer.
Full website backup:
To create a backup of your Dolphin community you need to copy both the files and the database associated with it.
You can find more information on how to download a copy of the application’s files here.
The instructions for exporting a database are available in this article.
Once the files are downloaded on your computer keep them in an easy accessible folder and if there is some issue you can quickly deploy them to your Dolphin hosting account and restore the website in its working condition.
