Question

I am just currently wondering how I can backup a folder which contains 8000+ images without the script timing out, the folder in all contains around 1.5gb of data, which we need to backup ourselves every so often.

I have tried the zip functionality provided in PHP, however it simply times out the request due to the huge number of files needed to be backed up, it does however work with smaller amounts of work.

I am trying to run this script through a HTTP REQUEST, would putting it through a Cronjob ignore the timeout?

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Answer 1

I would not use php for that.

If you are on linux I would setup a cron job and to run a program like rsync periodically.

A nice introduction about rsync.

Edit: If you do want / need to go the php way, you can also consider just copying instead of using zip. zip normally doesn’t do much with images and if you have a database already, you can check your current directory against the database and just do a differential backup (just copy the new files). That way only your initial backup would take a long time.