Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 14 ■ Administering Your Drupal Site
The next step is to set the schedule for automatic backups. To do so, click the Schedules tab at the top of
the page, revealing the configuration options shown in Figure 14-2. If you haven’t set a schedule previously,
the page will simply display an “Add schedule” link. Click that link to view the parameters that you can set for
scheduling backups. First, enter a name for the Schedule. We are going to set the backups to be performed
on a daily basis, so enter “Daily Backups” as the name. Next, set the “Backup every” field to 1 Day(s). Finally,
set the “Number of Backup files to keep” to 14, meaning Drupal will retain 14 days’ of backups before
deleting the oldest backup file and storing the newest file. This helps protect you from consuming massive
amounts of disk space for old backup files. Set this value carefully. You may have legal requirements in
your industry that require that you keep backup files for a certain number of days, weeks, months, or years.
Finally, click the “Save schedule” button.
Figure 14-2. Setting up the automatic backup schedule
Drupal will now automatically back up the site on a daily basis. The last step is to perform a manual
backup of your site. To do so, click the Backup tab (see Figure 14-3). On the resulting page, select the Default
Database as the database to back up from, set the “to” option to the Manual Backups Directory (you can also
select Download, which will download the backup to your local computer), and set the “using” option to
Default Settings. Finally, click the “Backup now” button.
Figure 14-3. Manually backing up your site
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