The BRC Indicia servers, Warehouse1 and Testwarehouse, are maintained by CEH computer support. They do both file backups and whole machine images as a matter of routine. They are virtual servers  hosted on a hardware cluster and use a storage area network which will have redundancy built in so ensuring a high resilience to faults. We also take measures to protect the servers against malicious or accidental damage of both the virtual and physical kind. Naturally, in the event of a catastrophic failure, it is only possible to revert to the last point of backup so some loss of data has to be accepted. Let me add my usual caveat to users of our servers; our offices are only staffed Mon-Fri, 9-5 so, if a fault does develop out of hours, you will have to wait till the office reopens for it to be rectified.

Another small point, while I think of it; never use the Testwarehouse for real data as it is more vulnerable because of the way we liberally invite newbies to try it out. It is also not inconceivable that we choose to wipe it clean and start afresh one day.

With regard to backing up your own Drupal-based website, copying the sites folder is not sufficient. All your content and settings are stored in the MySql database. A commercial host would likely manage backing this up for you. It is something you would have to discuss with them.

For a server that you manage yourself, the heavyweight answer is already documented. This schedules mysqldump using the MySql Admin tool to export the database to files which can then be copied to a backup medium. (However MySql Admin has been superseded by MySql Workbench that can do database dumps but will not schedule them.)

If you are running on XAMPP you have phpMyAdmin available which you can use for ad-hoc backups. See a descriptionand some screen shots.

Another alternative is to install the Drupal Backup and Migrate module. This can do scheduled backups. The Drupal documentation has even more suggestions.

As far as 'test' and 'live' is concerned I wouldn't particularly make a distinction. Considerations revolve around your capacity to store backups, the rate of change of your site and the extent of loss that is acceptable to you. What I most recommend is that it is automated.

Jim Bacon.