The guys that host my website have a nifty web control panel that allows me to tweak the site. It has a backup fuction that allows me to backup the entire site if I make a small change. The hosts also make a daily backup.

The thing is, these 2 backups don't contain exactly the same files. All the html and php files are in both, but I'm confused about my sql database.

My backup has myd, myi and frm files (what are these?) which look like the database files (I'm guessing cos of their names) - w3t_users, subscribe, ratings, banned etc.

But the backup that they produce doesn't contain these. It has 2 pm files; wt3vars.pm and wt3.pm - are they just compressed frm, myd, myi files? These pm files are also in my backup.

I emailed support last week with no repsonse so I'm hoping for better here!

No idea what the .pm files are but the .myd, .myi and .frm files are the raw database files that MySQL uses.

If you've got the .myd, .myi and .frm files then you should have a complete backup of the entire database.

I'm slightly concerned why their backup doesn't have these files.

Thanks for the info. As long as I have the database stored I'm happy!

It's probably some sort of compressed archive containing either the raw files or a dump of the tables. How big are the .pm files?

They're only 11kb and theres 2 of them. It can't be database data. Or can it?

I'll test out doing restores on a test site and see what I get.

Dunno. How big is your database?

Its only 10 days old, so I only have 28 users - all the raw files come to 400kb

It could be possible that it really is a backup of the tables as you don't have very much in there. MySQL files have quite a lot of meta data and indexes embedded in the files which makes them quite large.

A simpler backup can be done via phpMyAdmin. It can make a simple text file with the structure and data in the format of mySQL instructions. But I don't know much about this, and your database system could be different.

.pm files would be Perl Module files.

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- trs