How do I backup multiple Movable Type blogs?

How have you got MT set-up? Is it storing your entries in MySQL? The easist solution would be to write a shell/perl script that tar/gzips everything and stores it somewhere, and then get cron to run it daily, then download it from a secret page on your server.

Crap. Something like this (this is just an algorithm): in ~/backup.shexport entries from mysql, copy sql file to ~/mtbackup/sqlcopy your mt installation directory to ~/mtbackup tar czf ~/mtbackup mtbackup.tar.gz cp mtbackup.tar.gz ~/public_html/secretfolderthatonlyyouknowabout/then, install the win32 version of wget on your system, and have something like this in a batch file on your desktop:wget http://yourhost/yourdirectory/mtbackup.tar.gz

Okay, here's a sub-question: Is there a variable I can use in my crontab file to indicate the current date? So it makes a daily backup named like "mt_20031212.tar", for example.

Not that I'm aware of, but your crontab should only be invoking a shell or Perl script that lives elsewhere (which can understand the date) so that shouldn't matter.

The problem with ~/public_html/secretfolderthatonlyyouknowabout/ is that there's no guarantee that it will remain secret, either via a malicious party guessing, making a dictionary attack, etc. Once someone has that tarball, they have unfettered access to your weblog (if not your entire account.) Security through obscurity is always a gamble. If you have a static IP address for your desktop, you could theoretically include an .htaccess file that denies access to all IPs except yours, but I still wouldn't trust that degree of protection. (You'd also have to update the file if/when you change IPs.) Personally, I would install a Win32 copy of `scp` and use that to transfer the file from server to desktop. SCP is encrypted (thus, not spamming your password in plaintext over untrusted connections.) You'd have to put your password into the SCP command on your desktop, but if someone has physical access to/has rooted your home machine, you have far more to worry about than your Web server.

There's nothing about the backup itself that would need to be private/secure -- it's just an export of my entries and photos, and the HTML templates for presenting them. wget is proving quite useful, thanks for that suggestion.

Danelope: "security through obscurity" describes nearly every password based system in existence. What's to stop me from guessing or making a dictionary-based attack on Aaorn's ftp password? There's no guarantee that that would remain a secret either, despite his best efforts. Besides, it's not like he's storing ASIO records... it's a weblog. Who's going to try to come along and steal his backups?

You can use the http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/template.php to include the code of templates in an MT-generated page. (Even when you're using the "Link to an External File" feature, the code is duplicated from the file into the database.) So maybe you could create a template that's basically a dump of all the templates you want to back up, and grab the resulting built page via HTTP, eliminating the need for the FTP part of the process.

Hmm, http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/showtemplates.php may actually be better--you could loop through all the templates for a given blog without having to specify them all by ID or name.