I don’‘t know how I should make my Wildfire setup. It’'s important that the installation, backups and upgrades are simples and quicks to do. The number of “registered” users on our server should not exceed 50 . Do you recommend the use of an external database like MySQL ? Will I get an advantage to use it ? Will I get some problems with the use of the emdebed database ?
If I want to backup my embeded database, is it simple as make a tar.gz of the database directory without stopping the server ? And with an SQL database, can I make a backup of the db without stopping the database engine ?
First, the only thing I have to do for backup is a copy of the embeded-db directory ? Can I do this without stopping the server and without any risk of data lost/corruption ?
Second, can I revert to an external database later ? Maybe with the import/export plugin. Am I wrong ?
you don’'t need to stop Wildfire to make a backup.
http://www.hsqldb.org/doc/guide/ch05.html#N10F02 reads “The files can be backed up while the engine is running but care should be taken that a CHECKPOINT or SHUTDOWN operation does not take place during the backup.”
You should also backup conf/wildfire.xml as there the information which database you are using is stored.
The exp/imp plugin is as far as I know only for users - so if you did configure server side groups, MUCs, … you may lose a lot of information. You may want to shutdown Wildfire and take a look at embedded-db/wildfire.script - it’'s simple SQL and may be run within other database engines. I did post it here some days ago. Anyhow you may get problems with unicode characters as the embedded db stores them as \u1234 instead of using UTF-8.