Busy — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 11:08:35 +0000

if you're going to zip or gzip your database from phpmyadmin, be sure to optimize the rows first other wise this will corupt the zipped file (found this out the hard way)

Abhishek Reddy — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 02:10:32 +0000

If it was the tarball that was corrupt, the simple way to check is when you download backups, untar them and examine the file tree. If all is intact, you should be good.

If something else is getting corrupt, run a local web server with Apache, MySQL and PHP (hm, do this anyway) and keep a copy of all the sites you manage in it. The content may not have to be up to date all the time but at least you'll preserve the code. Or when you download good backups of the database, you can apply it to your local server copy too, if the content is important.