Basic questions: local vs public and file backup

Hey all,

I spent a while searching for the right tool to help me organize the setting, characters, etc for a writing project, and a wiki seemed ideal. I finally stumbled upon the BitNami installer, and it’s gone smoothly so far: the installation went without a hitch, and upon launching the new shortcut, I found myself staring at the home page of a brand new wiki to make my own.

I’m sure I’ll be able to teach myself the syntax and procedure of actually editing the wiki’s content, but I am not nearly technical enough to understand the behind-the-scenes mechanics of how all this works. I have a few questions that I haven’t been able to answer in the course of my own research:

1. I assumed that, since this wiki is running locally from my machine, all the files would be stored locally – so, why do I perceive a (small but noticeable) loading time when I click links?

2. Similar to #1 – is this wiki somehow tied to the Internet, or is it completely on my machine? I guess it would be nice to have access from any Internet connection, but I would also prefer the privacy and security of a totally local workspace.

3. When I create or edit a page, where/how are the files stored? I’d like to know for the purpose of being able to backup to an external drive.

Thanks for reading, and for humoring me and my utter technical ignorance.

Hi,

1. I assumed that, since this wiki is running locally from my machine, all the files would be stored locally – so, why do I perceive a (small but noticeable) loading time when I click links?

It depends on the Apache server and the MySQL server. This should not be very noticeable time.

2. Similar to #1 – is this wiki somehow tied to the Internet, or is it completely on my machine? I guess it would be nice to have access from any Internet connection, but I would also prefer the privacy and security of a totally local workspace.

All data is in your machine but you can access from internet to the wiki. Please take a look this blog post http://bitnami.org/article/how-to-install-and-m…

3. When I create or edit a page, where/how are the files stored? I’d like to know for the purpose of being able to backup to an external drive.

The data will be stored in a MySQL server in your machine. You can create a backup with the mysqldump command:

> mysqldump -u root -p bitnami_mediawiki > backup.sql

I hope it helps.

Thanks a lot for the response. My only lingering question regards that final point: since I am a technical idiot when it comes to the finer points of this sort of thing, I don’t know what a “mysqldump” is, let alone how to carry one out. Can you tell me where I am supposed to enter that command?

Hi,

The mysqldump is a command to create a database backup. You can type the following command from the “use_mediawiki” bash prompt that is in your Start Menu on Windows or in you installation directory on Linux or OS X:

mysqldump -u root -p bitnami_mediawiki > backup.sql

This will create a database backup that you can restore later. You can find more info at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/backup-m…

Excellent. Thanks again.