It has come to our attention that there are several vulnerabilities in the standalone cron and restore script, upgrading to the latest version will fix those issue.

As always, if you move the restore script to a folder outside XCloner for restore, once you are finished, as indicated also on the restore page, please delete the XCloner.php file.

Please visit our Downloads area or our Free forums if you have questions!

• Incremental database backup, to solve the large databases timeout issues
• Improved incremental file system scanning
• Backup limit splitter, for systems where archives larger than a certain size can’t be created, XCloner will split the backup archive into smaller parts
• Ability to exclude files larger than a certain file size
• JQuery UI Start interface
• Improved incremental restore process to fix files extraction timeout issues
• Ability to add backup comments

Please note, the current status is Beta, so we do not recommend it to be used on production sites just yet as we need to do further testing.

We would however appreciate any feedback input as always.

This version brings some new options to the Generate Backup process interface, including an ajax JSON engine and an incremental file scanning system.
From our tests, the new AJAX Generate backup system is much faster than the similar normal incremental mode, and it will also help with directory scanning timeouts on large filesystems.

The new AJAX system requires however PHP version to be at least 5.2.0 with JSON enabled. If XCloner determines the PHP version as being incompatible, it will default it’s backup process to the normal incremental mode.

To report bugs or request new features, please use the XCloner Free Forums.

You can download the latest XCloner version from our Joomla Downloads area.

One small note, we noticed the Joomla core does not include anymore the administrator/backups directory, so before using XCloner, this folder needs to be created and made writeable.

Congratulations to the Joomla 1.6 team for this great update.

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?p=971550#post971550

this is one of the many example the XCloner Standalone version can be used to backup and restore.

Thank you Paul for your detailed description, hopefully more users will get advantage of your post.

While a temporary url can be used, like the ones provided by Cpanel, Plesk, or a dedicated ip address, previewing the site from the actual domain name is even better.

Here is a quick and dirty trick to preview the website from a new hosting account, without actually changing the name servers:

By using the hosts file from your computer operating system, you can specify which ip address should be assigned to the domain name, so for instance if your new site ip address is xx.xx.xx.xx, then you can simply create an entry in your hosts files like this

xx.xx.xx.xx mydomain.com
xx.xx.xx.xx www.mydomain.com

Now next time when you open the site in your browser, it should be served from the server with ip address xx.xx.xx.xx specified in your hosts file. Note, that this change only takes effect on your local computer and does not affect other users; don’t forget to remove the entries once you are done.

As this wikipedia Hosts file tutorial indicates, the hosts files is located usually in

• %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\ for Windows
• /etc/hosts for most Linux distributions
• /private/etc/hosts for OSX

This tutorial is specially good for web designers as i know temporary urls usually mess up with design structure.

If you have any additions to this, would be happy to hear from you and your usual practices when doing a site move.

Order Deny, Allow
Deny from All

The administrator/backups folder is one of the folders you can use to secure with the above code, since you can use a ftp client to download the backups from it.

If you would like to restrict access to only your ip address, use this code:

Order Deny, Allow
Deny from All
Allow from my_ip

We all know spams are a big issues these days, specially spam bots, if you have identified them, and you have their ip address, you can block them from your site with this code placed inside the site root .htaccess file:

Order Allow, Deny
Allow from All
Deny from ip1
Deny from ip2

Here is a nice guide for a further reading on .htaccess protection.

The answer is pretty simple, we always think ahead in terms of security! Imagine if XCloner was dependable on your Joomla/Wordpress site and at some point the site gets hacked or becomes inaccessible, then your third-party extensions will also fail and you wouldn’t be able to create any backups or use some of it’s restore functions.

Since XCloner does not depend on a database structure to run it’s processes, and since it runs standalone, separated from the parent software integration code, it has less points of failing becoming more reliable, and backup reliability is what you need when securing your site files and database.

XCloner does work as a plugin for Joomla/Wordpress, but it can also be accessed directly by calling in your browser the administrator/components/com_xcloner-backupandrestore (Joomla) or wp-content/plugins/xcloner-backup-and-restore (WordPress), so you can always rest assured it will work even if the site become inaccessible.

And yes, please don’t forget to change your default XCloner admin login user and pass after the initial install and also delete the XCloner.php restore script after you have finished restoring your backups.

To Install and Generate an OSCommerce backup(time: 10 mninutes):

1. Download the XCloner Backup and Restore standalone version
2. Extract the backup archive and upload the files into a subdirectory of your choice under your oscommerce site, ex: xcloner/
3. Open that location in your browser and login for the first time, ex: http://mysite/xcloner
4. Open your XCloner Configuration screen, and adjust the Backup Start Path option so it points to your OSCommerce root directory
5. Create the directory administrator/backups/ under the Backup Start Path created at 4. and make it fully writeable, this step is required
6. Adjust the XCloner Configuration mysql settings from the Mysql Tab
7. Go ahead and generate a new backup

To Restore the created backup and make your new site live:

1. Follow the XCloner Backup Restore tutorial
2. Once you finished restoring the files and database, you need to adjust your two config files catalog/includes/configure.php and admin/includes/configure.php with the new host mysql and path settings
3. All done

For advanced usage, you may check the XCloner Online Wiki.