Hi there,

First off I would like to congratulate you Edwin on an outstanding product. We have purchased Multisites this week and have been blown away by the versatility and application of the product (we'll be posting a complete testimonial soon as it is certainly deserved).

I would like to ask a question to gage your thoughts towards website development on our Master server following Multisites deployment.

Previously when only having a single site we have been using Akeeba to take a backup of our production site for work on localhost and then uploaded the new version following development completion. I think there may be problems with this method whilst using Multisites so I'd like to ask if you have any other suggestions that would work well whilst using Multisites rather than simply developing on the production server.

I have seen your documentation about taking manual backups and restoring which I think would work:

jms2win.com/en/faq/faq-joomla-multi-sites#cat-268

but do you have any other suggestions?

I'd also like to confirm with you to what extent Akeeba would actually work? Is it possible to use this to take backups of the individual slave sites e.g. to provide clients with 'local' backups of their site on our network?

Thank you kindly for your advice and again for a great product.

To do a backup and restore on a local environment, we generally using the weekly backup shell script with all DBs.
www.jms2win.com/en/component/docman/doc_...ackup-script-all-dbs

This is a shell script that is designed for cPanel and if all the website are stored in the domains directory as recommended, you can do a backup of all the websites in one shot.
This will also keep the symbolic links and DB sharing.

When restore on a local machine, we recommend to keep the same directory structure and DB names and password.
So that, the restore is easy.

Personnally, we restore linux backup on windows platform.
When working on a localhost, the chapter 9 of JMS manual explain how to simulate the domain name in production.
So that you can do test and development with a perfect copy of your production.

The problem with akeeba backup is that it will not do the backup of all the slave site and it may also have problems with the symbolic links.
This is the reason why we created the shell script backup.
Some customer have been able to configure akeeba backup correctly but we never succeeded. So we are not able to guide you on the correct akeeba backup settings.