What is the “Best Practice to Copy a Site Undergoing Major Changes for Preservation?”
We have a website going to be drastically changed, however they want to preserve a past copy.
I’m sure this would change the design and arrangement of the widgets, so is my only recourse to copy each page from live, and assets from the folders, relink on my desktop and save a copy to my file server?
This is what I am presently doing and wanted to be sure I did not overlook anything the system can do.
I thought about placing each live item in an Archive Status and pulling it into a dated folder, where it should relink. But - this seems as if the Editor or Contributor could delete by accident.
What is your recommendations for when this happens again? I thought it was interesting and wanted to hear everyone’s thoughts.
If you’re looking to have your content and resources (text, images, CSS, PDFs, etc.) backed up outside of CM1, you could simply have your server admins take a backup of your published filetree. This would be very much a static backup, and you would have to manually rebuild this content within CM1 to restore it, but at least you would know you have all of it in some form.
Alternately, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to set aside one of you CM1 application server backups (Percussion filetree and database) from before enacting these major changes, so that you could always temporarily restore and start up an earlier instance of CM1 to access older content / templates / etc.
Thank you - I like your suggestion. I think it is more about simply having the text and format available for the possibility of using pieces of it here and there. Most often they want to word something as was done previously or look for an old photo they once had.
I would of course not do this for all sites, but a few do fall into the category of being high level enough to merit this.