The Work Force Backup and Restore feature allows users to quickly take a backup of all of their Work Force data. The data can be restored at any time to refresh the Work Force content to a previous state or transferred to another Work Force installation.

Backup and Restore Overview

Figure A: Work Force Backup and Restore
Figure A: Work Force Backup and Restore

The Backup and Restore buttons in the Work Force administrator are pretty self-explanatory. However, it is important to note that if you have a very large number of employees the backup and restore routines can easily run out of memory. It is advisable to run the backup/restore at non-peak hours if you have issues with memory utilization. 

In Work Force, there is a parameter in the restore function (Figure B) – the DB Prefix field. This is used for cases when you may need to move data from an older site to a newer site that has a different randomly-generated prefix (eg. from Joomla 1.6+). If you supply the name of the prefix used (eg ‘qewer_’) in the backup file, the restore routine will substitute the current site’s prefix for all instances of the “old” prefix prior to importing.

Figure B: Work Force Restore
Figure B: Work Force Restore