Data Administration

Backups

Backup ManagementBackup and Restore Management for your phpVideoPro data you find in the Admin menus item Database Backup. The form shown (see screenshot) allows you to select the backup type and whether the resulting backup file should be compressed on one side, and on the other side lets you chose an existing backup to restore from plus whether you want to append these data to those already existing in your database, or to purge the old data first.

To use this functionality, you must define the backup directory in your inc/config.inc. This directory needs to be readable and writeable by the web server (the latter is needed if you want to store the backups directly on the server - without that, you can only create and download them). The reason why this is not configurable via the web interface is to prevent people from abusing this functionality - though they needed to have an account with administrative privileges to do so, plus access to the file system to place a file to restore from. But one never knows.

Sure you could simply do a database dump and file system backup. But the integrated backup of phpVideoPro offers you some advantages over that:

• no need to fiddle around with the database dump options
• automated compression (on demand)
• backup selected components or the complete database
• backup all movie information using an phpVideoPro internal format allows transferring data even between different versions of phpVideoPro
• easy way of appending data from one backup to the existing data allows e.g. merging data from another phpVideoPro installation into yours

Orphans

Files

Cleanup orphaned filesThe first question is: What are orphaned files? The screen accessible via the Admin menus item Removal of orphaned files will tell you this in detail. Including a list of orphaned files found in your phpVideoPro installation.

The only stuff saved to the file system (beside some cache which will be purged automatically) are image files retrieved from the IMDB sites. As soon as you used the integrated IMDB search to retrieve movie details, phpVideoPro will also save the image attached to that record, and insert a link to the movie description. If you decide you don't want this image to be displayed there, and removed the link from the description, the image file still resides on your disk - and then can be found (and removed) here. Simply click on the Delete button.

Database Entries

Manage orphaned database entriesOK - we got that with the files. But what (and how) can be orphaned in the database? Some entries have certain relations: Staff members are associated with movies, movies belong to their respective owners, and so on. Though the application takes care for these relations, and e.g. deletes staff members when you delete the last movie they are associated to, there may be situations where an orphan is left (in old versions, this happened e.g. when you replaced a staff member in a movies record). So just in case, here you have the possibility to clean them up. Or at least to see if there are any - and report a bug when you are sure it is the applications fault…