The warning at the top of the thread seems to be complaining about foreign characters (the atilde and curren symbols):

Nä

Maybe try and remove them and see if that fixes things.

My backup is no good as it was made at a point when I thought I had the problem sorted but apparently not.

FWIW, that is one reason why it is good to keep as many backups as possible for as long as possible.

It looks like either the database got corrupted or there is a bug in the code and it isn't reading the sizing information for some reason.

If you know how to access the database, you could see if the sizing information is missing for that image.

I thought I had fixed this problem but in all my images uploaded before a certain date it still exists.  The affected images (majority of my portfolio) cannot be edited and show no size information in the pricing table.

Can you give an example...

I think that he is asking for "hidden" categories.

The users wouldn't necessarily see or use it, but the contributors could use various codes to assign more meanings to their images, and then filter on it and possibly even perform other processes on the filtered sets.

Quote from: Ron on August 28, 2013, 17:31

Can I just drag the www folder onto my 1TB ext HD? Will that be a proper back up?

If your www folder also contains your MySQL database backups, then you should be able to do that.

Otherwise you would need to also copy the database backups.

While that solution is easy, the problem is that it can take a LONG time if you have to do that on a daily basis and you have a lot of images.

One more thing that I forgot to mention...

You can ignore the symbiostock_xml_cache directory from your backup (which will reduce the size of your backups by quite a bit).

a plugin compatibility issue: I have this plugin called "Meta slider" that I use for my homepage slider and it gives the following error:

Warning: Required call to wp_footer() not found in file /mysite /wp-content/themes/symbiostock/footer.php.

Please check the wp_footer() documentation and make sure your theme has a call to wp_footer() just above the closing tag.

is there something that needs to be added to the code so it is %100 compatible with the slider plugin?

I (and others) use Meta Slider and have had no issues.  But I am on 2.5.7.

Leo:

Thanks a LOT!

FYI: This seems to be version 2.6.2 (according to the styles.css file)

Blessings.

Can I just drag the www folder onto my 1TB ext HD? Will that be a proper back up?

If your www folder also contains your MySQL database backups, then you should be able to do that.

Otherwise you would need to also copy the database backups.

While that solution is easy, the problem is that it can take a LONG time if you have to do that on a daily basis and you have a lot of images.

I'll try to get github updated btw.

That would be awesome! 

Wow, thanks ShazamImages for your thread about this.

I'm glad that you found the information interesting.

However, if I have to make a backup myself, do I have to ZIP and download my entire Wordpress installation - 20GB of stuff?

When you zip up the files, it will compress them somewhat.  The amount of compression depends on the type of file (and the type of compression used).  Text files (such as source code for the Symbiostock theme, plugins, etc) will usually compress around 90-95%.  Images will usually only compress about 5-10%, since they are already compressed file formats.  So your backup will be less than 20 GB, but how much less is unknown.

Anyway, yes you would need to download the entire amount the first time.  You could break up the backup into smaller chunks, and then backup each chunk separately.  That might make it more manageable.

But subsequent backups could be much smaller if you break up your backups into "segments".

For example, you don't need to download ALL of your images every day.  You just need to download the images once (or maybe twice for extra security).  After that you only need to download any new images that you upload.  Symbiostock renames your images and appends a number to the beginning of the image file name.  So you could backup all of your images where the file name begins with 100 to 199 in one backup, and then backup images where the file name begins with 200 to 299 in another backup, etc.  Once you back those images up and download them, you don't need to back them up again.  So the backups become much more manageable (and take less time downloading).

I have broken up my backups into five "segments":
- Original Images
- Generated Images (thumbnails and watermarks)
- Other Images
- Everything Else (source code, plugins, etc)
- MySQL Database

And then re-upload that in case of a failure?

Yes, unfortunately you would have to upload the entire thing in order to do a recovery.  The good news is that you would be able to do a recovery.  If you didn't have the backups, you might not be able to recover and you would have to start from scratch all over again!

...I decided to back up the site to my computer.  It took me two days of attempts and the final - and  successful backup took nearly six hours to download.  Not something I want to try every day.

The first time I did a full backup, I had the same issue.  It took hours to download.  In addition, when I tried to schedule it with GoDaddy, GoDaddy killed it after about a minute (I guess they feel that anything that is taking that long is a runaway process).

So I then decided to break up the backups into "segments".  This has allowed me to download the backups to my local computer in about 10-20 minutes each day (even though I have uploaded a lot more images, added plugins, etc).

Try doing it again, but this time take the dash (-) out of the file name.

I have been in the IT industry for a few decades and thought that I would share some tips on how to administer a Production website properly.  Hopefully some of you will find this useful:

Many Symbiostock artists have never had a website before and therefore don't understand any of the standards associated with the IT industry.

Your Symbiostock site is an e-commerce site.  It's sole purpose (for the majority of artists), is to sell your artwork.

Your Symbiostock site should also be what is referred to as a "Production" website.  You should never be developing or testing on your Production website.  You should setup another website for development and testing.

Your Symbiostock website should be up and running 99.999% of the time.  This is commonly referred to as the "five nines": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_nines

FYI: If you are up for 99.999% of the time, then you will only be down for a little over 5 minutes per year! 

If your website is down when a customer comes to it for the first time, they might never return again.  If a customer is returning to your website while it is down, they might never come back again.  Either way, that could end up in lost sales.  This is not something that you want to happen.

Here are some "tips":

Backups:
   - Backup your website often.  If your website crashes, you can't recover unless you have a backup.  How often you backup your website is a decision that you need to make, but once a day is a good starting point.
   - Backup your website during "off-hours".  "Off-hours" is a term used to denote a time when there is very little traffic on your website.  You don't want to be running a backup while customers are using it, because it might slow down your website (since it is using resources to do the backups) and the customer might get annoyed and leave.  You also want to do a backup when traffic is slowest so that the data in your backups will be "consistent" (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_consistency).   Evenings and weekends are usually the slowest time for most websites, but you need to figure out what is the slowest time for your website and then schedule backups during that timeframe.  Remember that a website can be accessed from all around the world, not just the country where you reside.
   - Backup your website before you make ANY changes.  The last thing you want is to make a change and then receive the "white screen of death".  If your website goes down and it takes you hours (or days) to bring it back up, that will most likely lead to lost sales and annoyed customers.
   - Keep as many backups as you can for as long as you can.  You never know when you will need to recover from a backup that was from a week or two ago.  Sometimes updates look like they go well at first, but then you find a serious issue a week or more later.  Remember, you can't recover if you don't have the appropriate backup.

Maintenance (also commonly referred to as "Change Control")
   - Maintenance includes any sort of change to your website, including adding, modifying, and deleting plugins, widgets, themes, etc.
   - All maintenance should be fully tested on a non-Production website.  You don't want to use your Production website for testing purposes.
   - Maintenance should only be delivered during off-hours.  Once again, you don't want to make a change to your website and then have it go down for hours during your time of highest traffic.
   - All maintenance deliveries should have a "rollback plan".  A "rollback plan" is a way to reverse the changes that you made, just in case things don't go as planned.
   - Try to withhold doing updates right after they come out.  This is called being on the "bleeding edge" (and there is a reason for the terminology).  Wait at least a few days or even a week or two before applying an update.  This will give the developers a chance to find any bugs that they couldn't find in their testing phase.

Please note that this isn't an all-inclusive list, but rather just a starting point.

Hopefully others that have been in the industry will chime in and add some "tips" as well.