We’ve had a lot of interest in the Automatic Compost Sifter – Screen post. One visitor of the site, Richard Buxton, posted a comment and sent a picture. I was so impressed I asked him to submit some more details so I could post it up as its own article. So, below we present the “Son of Sid”:

A sieve-box moves backwards and forwards by means of an electric motor. Sifted material falls through a mesh base and a guide chute into a wheelbarrow below. The sieve-box is hinged to allow debris to be tipped out.

Two open boxes; similar to kitchen drawers but without bases, are nested inside one another and arranged so that the inner box may be tipped up on a piano hinge for clearing any material that does not fall through the mesh.

The two nested boxes have four small, in-line castors underneath to allow lateral movement along two rails. These full-length rails are supported on six anti-vibration mounts (Elasto Mount – AT type) that attach through angle brackets to the inside faces of the long-rails of a supporting table-frame.

Movement is provided by a reciprocating saw clamped to a board and firmly anchored across the running rails. The Saw mechanism is connected by means of a push-pull bar fixed to the outer of the two nested boxes with a gate latch and 10mm bolt.

The reciprocating saw has been modified to disable the original power switch and the simple speed control electronics have been removed and adapted to provide a slower rate of reciprocation. A watertight enclosure fixed to the saw mounting board contains the removed speed controller circuit together with an illuminated on/off switch and a speed adjustment knob as operator controls.

The running rails are joined together by cross batons in the manner of railway sleepers so that all moving components and all anti-vibration mounts act in unison. As the reciprocating mechanism moves so does the sieve-box assembly.

The fitted mesh is ½ inch square but a finer mesh of ¼ inch may be dropped in on a sub frame for a finer particle size.

• Overall dimensions of table-frame: Length1340 – Width 560 – Height 950
• Sieve box: Length 610 – Width 455 – Depth 120
• Original speed 300 – 3000 cycles/min. Modified speed 0 – 200 cycles/min.
• Power consumption estimated to be in the order of 100W

In motion for the first time

Rail with castor & A / V mount

This view shows the sifting box tipped up.

You can also see a rudimentary mudguard covering the castor wheel but some
sifted compost is visible on the running rail so I think I will need to fit full length
mudguards instead of these boy-racer ones.

Son of Sid has a very smooth action
The speed controller is subject to variation due to ambient temperature but luckily the purely
accidental selection of components I used (potentiometer and two resistors) allows me to adjust the speed accordingly.

If I load it too heavily I need to turn the wick up a little to get him running properly and as he empties I can turn it down.

The concept idea came from Sid the Sifter and my motivation was nothing more than laziness.

People often say, “Here’s something I made form bits I had lying around.”
True I did use a few lying around bits but I bought most of it – the most sexpensive of course being the saw
which cost £36 ($52)

This picture shows motor, control box and combined tool store and cup holder. (I am NOT responsible for the brickwork in the background).
Three quarter view. Notice tipping hinge and strain relief bracket on table frame – slotted into carrier box to reduce tipping strain
The Design
Speed controller: The Red Wheel is a combined switch and speed potentiometer - on the full speed setting the switch bypasses the speed control. I removed this control completely – five soldered connections
Speed controller reverse: You can easily see the five joints all in a circle that hold the potientiometer on the circuit board. The new control potentiometer connects to the two pads on the left. I used a 120K linear pot and added ballast resistors by trial and error to get the speed range I wanted. I think the total resistance was close to 850k – up from 500k on the original

A huge thanks to Richard for all the great pictures and information!

I’ve been fascinated with automatic chicken coop doors.   My current auto coop door closer has been working like a champ for months.  I received a lot of great replies to that thread, and one of them was from a visitor named Bob.    I was so impressed with his design and pictures I asked him if I could post his comments and pictures as an article here.   I’m SUPER glad he agreed.   So, below are his words:

Here is the automatic door I built with an automatic car antenna (click the image to see it in action). I chose the antenna method because it has a built in stop when it reaches its end in both directions. This eliminates the need of more circuitry to control “run time”.

Mine runs off a little 12v lawn tractor battery. The battery is kept up to charge with a “float” charger. The door opens and closes with a photo light sensor. The reason for the battery is so that a power failure will not cause a problem. The reason for the light sensor is so that the length of daylight does not need to be constantly adjusted on a timer. BUT, you can simplify things and use an ordinary appliance timer plugged into an AC outlet, and then use a 12v DC power supply to power the antenna.

This is just one way to use an automatic car antenna. With some imagination you could probably come up with many more designs.
As you can see the antenna is mounted upside down. The door is made from an 1\8″ ALUMINUM panel. It is light in weight but very strong. The door channels are 1/4″. I have a 3″ spacer connected to the tip of the antenna to the door. You can measure the distance you need to determine the spacing length. I used a piece of aluminum stock and tapped each side to mount it. The side on the antenna tip has a hole for the tip to set in, and then I used the tapped hole as a “set screw” to keep the tip in place. I have my tip connected towards the bottom of the door. This makes the length of the door channel a bit shorter in order to match the up and down stroke of the antenna.

Be sure to carefully measure the lengths and travel distances needed for the antenna to move up and down freely. I have heard of some discussion that the travel distance does not need to be exact because the antenna’s “auto stop” feature will sense the end travel and the motor will time out. But that will be up to you.

If you do not have some aluminum sheeting lying around, you can find some at Lowe’s or etc. Aluminum can be easily cut with your skill saw. Just make sure you have a carbide blade and wear safety goggles. Even some type of plastic sheet would work. Just keep it light and strong.

The door channels can be purchased also at Lowe’s or Home Depot.

The best price for the antenna was on-line at Beachaudio.com, but they may be out of stock. Just search the web for the least expensive “automatic antenna”. Mine was about $35.00. The antenna MUST only have three wires. (Beware of the non automatic antennas that require the user to “toggle” the antenna up and down manually). Two wires connect directly to your power source. The other wire that is not black or red, is the “up down” trigger. That is the wire that you connect to the timer or sensor circuit.

If you go with the 12V battery, the float charger can be bought at Harbor Freight Tools for under $10.00.

I have updated this article to mention that the there may be a better control system other than the night/daylight sensor that is described below. I have used this sensor for about a year. However, just recently I noticed that the control unit was sometimes “confused” in the mornings and would make the antenna move up and down erratically.  Not fun for the chickens. It was mainly due to setting the photocell too sensitive in order to stay open at night as long as possible. Please be sure to read the later posts regarding an Intermatic ST01C timer. This timer is very unique because it does not rely on household current to operate. It is also very unique because it has an “astronomical” feature which updates the internal clock when dusk and dawn occurs in your region. It is powered by a 2 year lithium battery. Below is the night/daylight photocell circuit, if you decide to want to experiment with it.

Here is the circuit.  Its pretty simple and self explanatory and would require someone that has done a little soldering in the past.

The only thing that is really not explained is the CDS photocell. One could try different types to see which works best. The one I ended up using was from a photocell variety package purchased from Radio Shack.

If you decide to go with the photocell circuit, the antenna’s power wires (red and black) must be always connected to the 12vdc power source and not be controlled by the photocell circuit.

A few thumbnails you can click on for the control box, door channel, battery / charger, photocell

On the other side of the box I have a little slider switch that makes the door close manually.

The tip spacer/connector will probably be the hardest part for a lot of people to figure out to. There plenty of ways to get that done. I had a piece of an aluminum rod that was solid. I drilled and tapped each side of it. There is a screw going through the outside of the door to one side of the rod. I drilled a hole in the rod for the antenna tip to sit in. The screw on that side of the rod is a set screw that keeps the tip in place.

(Rob Note:  A huge thanks to Bob for this great design, pics and wrtieup and for letting me post it on the site.   I know we are both looking forward to reading some of your comments!)

Rest In Peace Ming-Ming Duck

After years of thinking about this, and after 2 separate raccoon attacks I finally found some time to create a prototype / proof of concept of my auto chicken coop door closer.    You can read the details of the initial design here: http://www.nifty-stuff.com/automatic-chicken-coop-door.php.   The most recent coon attack was 3 weeks ago when a gang of 4 coons came into the coop just an hour after sunset.   They were able to kill a hen and our only duck before I got out there to scare them away.

It is a terrible feeling knowing that if you had only gone out a few moments earlier that everybody would be fine.  It only takes a single night of forgetting, or not getting home in time to lock up the coop and an entire flock could be destroyed.

As stated in my original auto chicken coop door plans, I only needed a design that would close the door in case we forgot or couldn’t make it home in time.   We’ll still try to manually close the coop up, but this will give us the extra safety net we need to make sure everyone sleeps safe!

Here is the BETA Version 1.0 Open & Close

Here is how the auto coop door works:
(click on image for labels)

1. The digital timer (110 volt AC powered) triggers at a predetermined time (6:30 pm, 15 mins after sunset) and sends power for 1 minute through an AC to DC adapter (12v 200mA) which powers the car door lock actuator.
2. The actuator receives power and pulls, with a good amount of force, the pin which releases the door.
3. The door falls swiftly to the closed position and stops on a piece of rubber bike tire for cushioning.
4. A pivoting piece of wood with a reflector falls down.  This allows us to shine a flashlight from the house, about 150 feet away, to see if the door has closed without walking to the coop.
5. A spring loaded pin / latch falls and locks into place preventing any would be killers from lifting the door.
6. Resetting the system is simple:  Pull on the spring loaded pin while raising the door.  Hook the door onto the top release pin.

Here is a video of the auto coop door closing (narrated by my 5 year old Alana using a rotary timer):

Here are some notes and changes to the original plan:

The Actuator, Pin, & Brackets:
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the actuator has two holes that allowed for easy mounting onto my door.  It also has a nice swivel ring to which I could connect my pin.   The pin and brackets were just some old pieces I found around the house.  I wanted the left most bracket to push against the door hanger to ensure a clean release.  The bracket to the right is there to guide the pull pin and to make sure the pull pin didn’t fall with every release.
Cutting Power:
I was very concerned about the actuator motor burning out during the 1-3 minutes that power was being sent to it.  These aren’t designed to continue to run.  I had two ideas on how to solve this, either:  1) Install a limit switch at the bottom or the top of the unit to cut power once the door fell, or use relays or a circuit to provide power to the actuator just long enough to pull the pin.  

While staring at my design it hit me, “Everything is made out of metal… metal conducts electricity!”   I stuck my alligator clips to the bracket and to the pin and voila, once the door falls the circuit is broken and power is cut to the actuator!    To the right is a closeup of the bracket and the pin (click for a larger version).  You’ll see that the pin rests on the bottom hold of the bracket.  The weight of the door pulls the pin down to make firm contact with the bracket which ensures good current flow.

Securing The Chicken Door:
Gravity was really good at helping me drop the door into position, but not so good at keeping the door closed from prying little claws.  I needed a way to lock / latch the door into place once it fell.  I played around with the swivel latch in my original design, but couldn’t get it to work reliably with the thin door I was using.    I ended up with what I felt was a wonderful idea:   Have a pressure / spring loaded pin push against the door so when the door falls past it, it snaps into place.   After a few tests with a paper clip I upgraded to some heavier gauge wire and now nothing is lifting that door.   If two coons can work together, one of them somehow climbing up to pull on the pin while the other raises the door, then they deserve to get at my flock!

Flagging A Successful Close:
This was just for fun.   As long as I had all these chain reactions going on, I decided to add one more.   Our back door sits parallel to this auto coop door.   We’re far enough out that we’d have to walk outside of the house about 150 feet to see if the door successfully closed.   I added a piece of wood with a pre-drilled hole and a screw as a swivel point.   When the door is up, the block of wood with a reflector attached, points toward our door.  A quick shot with a flashlight shows bright red reflection and that the door is still open.   Once the door falls, so does the block of wood and reflector.   At that point the reflector is lying down and can’t be seen by our flashlight which means the door has successfully and completely closed!

Sunset Calculator & Setting Door Close Time:
I found a great tool to determine my sunset time on a calnedar.  I noticed that for 10/26 my sunset time was 6:17 pm.   Of course, it is still pretty light outside at sunset so I watched my girls.  Then all were in the coop by 6:23 pm so I set the door to close at 6:30 pm.   I’ll watch it again tonight, and if all is well, I expect that I’ll be able to maintain 15 minutes past “sunset” as my time to close the door.

Parts:

• Car door lock actuator:  a pair on ebay for $11 (included shipping).
• Digital Timer: $8.00.  You can get the cheapo rotary ones for $4
• AC Adapter: 12 volt, 200 mA.  I have tons of adapters lying around.  This one came from an old portable phone charging base.
• Pins, brackets, wood - All were around the house.  A bit of cutting, drilling and bending got me what I needed.

Next Steps:

• Slow down the door descent:   It doesn’t seem to really bother the girls when the door falls, but I’d like to have a slower fall just to be sure.
• Decide if the current design of cutting power by breaking the circuit is a good way to go.  I’d like to use a circuit that gives a quick 0.5 second shot of power.
• Make the system portable: I’m powering this with an extension cord from the house.  I’d like to find a way to make everything battery powered.  Potentially using a cheap battery powered alarm clock, some relays, and a circuit or two.  One issue is if I call charge something like a capacitor from batteries to shoot enough current into the actuator to do its job.
• Clean everything up:  It would be cool to resolve all the bullet points above and create a self contained, battery powered, easy to mount and easy to set auto chicken coop door closer!

I’m anxious to hear your thoughts and suggestions on this design.   So far I’ve been watching it work for 3 days and I’m pretty happy with it!    What do you think?   What would you change or add to the design?

UPDATE 11/7/08 – Wow, this thing is working like a CHAMP!  It is such a good feeling to not have to always be wondering “Did we remember to lock up the chickens!?!?”    Also, it really helps out at times like tonight:  We went out for a date night with another couple before sunset.   We stayed out for a few hours past dark and didn’t worry one bit about our girl’s safety!    Woot!

There’s a great discussion at http://www.backyardchickens.com/ about improving this design and some really great ideas about a new design using linear actuators and circuits!  Check it out: http://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=99668

UPDATE 12/11/08 – You know how people say something / someone was a “life saver”?  Well, I wanted to let everyone know that this simple auto coop door closing system has literally been a life saver for my remaining hens!

Last night we didn’t get out to the coop until late.   When I opened the door to go outside I heard scurrying from 2 directions and then I saw them… 1 coon up in a tree and 2 over in the bushes (the 3 remaining ones from the group of 4 that killed our duck and hen a month ago).    I’m almost certain our whole flock would have been dead had the auto door not done its job.

UPDATE 8/11/09 – I’ve had a couple times over the last few months where I found the coop open in the morning (i.e., it didn’t close the night before).   For details see:  Pin didn’t pull and door didn’t fall

Bottom line:   Automated door closers are fantastic!  I know ours has saved our hens on multiple occasions, but be careful not to get a false sense of 100% security.

I’m sure you guys know about that “middle button” that is hiding underneath your scroll wheel on your mouse, right?  Usually it is set to some useless feature like “auto scroll”…  I mean, come on… who uses auto scroll anyway?   Well, the very first time I discovered that button (and how useless it truly was) I opted to change the default behavior.  Instantly I fell in love with the “minimize all” command and mapped that to my middle mouse button.   Just like many of you reading this, I’m a desktop icon junkie.  I drop anything and everything onto my XP desktop (downloads, new images, stuff I’m working on, etc.) to the point it looks like this:

Well, I’m also one of those guys that has about 15 windows open at any given time… browsers, spreadsheets, Dreamweaver, Outlook, Explorer, etc.   I find that I often need to quickly get access to my desktop to edit, move, or upload a file.    Hitting the minimize button on each window isn’t an option, and the “Windows Key + D” command just isn’t comfortable to me.   So, having the ability to hit a single button where my finger is already hanging out is just super convenient!

Up until a year ago my software allowed me to easily set this middle button, via a pull down option, to one of many things.  Minimize All was there and so mapping that function to the button was just super simple… well, that changed and so this is why I’m writing this post!

A while ago I got a new wireless keyboard mouse combo (a Logitech Cordless Desktop LX500).  I was super happy with it… but wait, what’s this:

NO OPTION FOR MINIMIZE ALL?    Oh my gosh you’ve got to be kidding me!  

Well, I wasn’t going to trash my keyboard for the lack of minimize all, so I resigned myself to simply using the “Minimize” option which just minimizes one at a time.

I can hear you geeky types now, “Just assign the keyboard command “WindowsKey + D” as a “Keystroke Assignment”!  Yeah, well, I tried that about 20 times and the software doesn’t recognize the WindowsKey!

Well, today my combo went looking on the net for an upgrade to the software during a periodic update check and found one.   I downloaded and installed with my fingers crossed hoping for an answer to my prayers… but alas, I was left with the same boring options as before.   But this time, there was a difference… I was determined to find an answer, so here’s what I did:

First Step:
Find or create the application that minimizes all called “Show Desktop” (instructions on how to create a minimize all shortcut here).

Second Step:
My keyboard allows me to map to a program of file, but of course my mouse does not.   I read the instructions on how to create a keyboard shortcut (bottom of page) to a program.

Third Step:
After some trial and error I realized I had to create a regular desktop shortcut to the “Show Desktop” application (copy it and paste as shortcut) to my desktop.  I then clicked “properties” on this shortcut and assigned ctrl+alt+9 to that shortcut.

Final Step:
Finally, into the Logitech software I went and assigned my Middle Button to the new key command, which triggers a shortcut, that triggers the “Show Desktop” command that actually minimizes all the windows…. PHEW!

If you know of a better way to do this (other then “Hey stupid, get a different keyboard”) then please let me know.  

 

Many of you know that I became the owner of www.backyardchickens.com about a year and a half ago.  Since that time the new BYC Chicken Forum has grown like crazy.   It has been a lot of fun taking what I learned from my very first forum (the one tied to this domain, the Nifty-Stuff Printer Forum) and using that information (along with the help of 13,000 great members and some excellent moderators) to really build up a great community.

Over the past 19 months there have been a lot of requests for different topics to be added to the BYC Forum.  Subjects like gardening, sufficient living, etc.  Unfortunately these topics are just too grand to be limited to only a few sections on a chicken site (no offense to BYC).   For this reason I embarked on creating some new forums that would allow the community to explore these topics in greater detail.  Hence the birth of:

http://www.theeasygarden.com/ - The first “sister site” to BYC.  Already with almost 1,000 members discussing one of my favorite topics:  Gardening!

http://www.backyardcows.com/ - What started out as an April Fool’s joke in 2007 turned out to be something the community was interested in developing.   And people thought BackYardChickens was unique! 

http://www.sufficientself.com/ - Here is another topic that came up very frequently on BYC and also involves a lot of topics to which I am very interested in discussing:  Sufficient Living!   Everything from renewable energy and frugal living to financial aptitude and homeschooling.

The audiences of these 4 forums (the three above and http://www.backyardchickens.com/) overlap quite a bit.  Many of the same members like to visit all of the forums to learn and share.   Interestingly enough, these visitors are very uniquely different from the Nifty-Stuff Printer Forum.  Who knows, maybe with time some of the techies in the printer forum will see the light of backyardchickens and at the same time, some of the sufficient living minded people will learn the beauty and joy of refilling printer cartridges! 

You may have read my post a few years back regarding my Homemade Compost Sifter Screen Sieve.  I’ve received some great feedback and comments on this fun little project.  One of them really caught my attention and with the permission of the inventor I’m going to post his amazing improvements here!

It all started back on 5/4/08 when I received the following email:

“Hello Rob,I stole your idea and took it on one stage… hope you like it!  Check out Sid, he’s just doing his job… that’s all!Cheers for the inspiration”Attached was the following video:

I was blown away at the design!   I promptly asked for more a few picture of the mechanism which I received (click thumbnail for larger image):

    

I also received a little more info:  “I used some old drawer runners for the carriage to slide smoothly and the spinning crank bit is an old component from some office furniture, I think it is a bracket that you bolt a leg onto and then screwed the plate onto the underside of a table/desk top.  Quite good as it has a “Hex” shape recess to take an M10 bolt, so the shaft can’t wear out and start spinning around.”

My only question / suggestion to this amazing design was, “Any thoughts on how to make this so you don’t have to dump out the contents?   I’ve wondered if a gravity fed system with an agitator would work.”

The reply came: “You were so right about the – having to stop every 4 shovels to take out the stones!  A radical free think was required this morning and now Sid sieves, sorts and spits without the need to stop… ever!  I end up with rocks over 1 inch in the barrow and stones between 1/2 – 1 inch in the blue box which I recycle to create the walking areas between the raised beds!”

Here’s an updated video:

WOW, no more shoveling. But it got even better with the next design that did 3 individual sortings at once!!!:

Well, just when I thought I had seen it all, the design got even better:

Just amazing!!!    This beautiful contraption makes my little manual compost sifter look like a couple of dumb boards nailed together.

If you have any comments on this design or would like to share your own version please comment below!

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There is a 1.5 acre empty lot behind our house and every year theyd “disc” it to remove weeds for fire suppression.  I’ve heard about people renting goats and sheep for mowing down weeds and thought it would be fun to try, but I never got past the thought.

A month ago I discovered my niece has 7 sheep and she needs to get rid of a couple.  I contacted the owner of the property behind our place and the said we were welcome to try out sheep weed abatement, but if the neighbors complained we’d have to get rid of them.

So, here are the new editions to our urban farm:

St. Croix Sheep: Maggie (dark brown) and her son Joey and Leo in the back

We had to separate Maggie from one of her other children and she’s not happy about it.  Her bleating for her other son is not making the neighbors happy (we live in a pretty urban area… there just happens to be an empty lot here) and we’re hoping she’ll calm down soon.

Here’s the “pre sheep” lot (click for larger version)

I’ll continue to take pictures as things progress… that is assuming the neighbors don’t call the animal cops on us.

Anybody bets on how long it will take these sheep to clear the weeds in the 1.5 acre lot?

Rest In Peace Grey Chicken

I’ve been wanting to design an automatic chicken coop door closer for years.   There are plenty of other systems out there that automatically open and close the coop door, but they are expensive and, well, not designed by me! 

Basically my idea is to create a simple system that is a “safety net” in case we don’t remember to lock our girls in at night.  I have no problems letting the girls out in the morning, but I want to ensure they are closed up safe in the evening.   I learned my lesson the hard way one night when I got home late from a party and a coon had killed my favorite hen.

Some have commented ”What if all the girls don’t get in the coop in time, or get caught in the guillotine door as it closes?”   My response: I don’t think I’ve ever found my girls outside of the coop when it is dark.   For my auto coop door I’d set the timer to go off an hour after dark to ensure they are all in.  Remember, my design is more of a fail-safe than a system to 100% rely on, I don’t know if any auto system is.

I’m always worried that I’ll forget to lock up the girls, this auto close system at least give me some insurance just in case we forget.   If it works really well then you only need to check in occasionally to verify the girls are always getting in and that the door is closing properly and at the right time.

In my opinion, I’d rather risk loosing one hen that didn’t get into the coop in time instead of loosing all my girls because I forgot to lock them up.

The Design:

My first auto coop door design called for an electromagnet holding the door open.  At night I’d cut the power and the door would fall.  I found problems very quickly with this design, mostly heat, energy loss, etc.   I then moved to a different electromagnet, a type of ”pull solenoid” to pull a pin to release the door.   There were problems with that design too, it required too much power to move a solenoid strong enough to pull a pin.

So far, the best thing I’ve played with is a car lock actuator I bought on ebay ($11 shipped for two).   My basic design is simple,  I’m thinking about using only three parts:

1. A $5 wall adapter
2. A $5 lamp timer
3. A $5 car lock actuator

Below is a sketch of the design.   Here is how it works:

At night the timer hits the pre-set ”on” time and sends power through the adapter and turns on the actuator
The actuator pulls a pin which releases the coop door
The door falls and covers up the coop access
The “door latch” (in red) is an “L” shaped piece of metal with a pin in the top which allows it to swing.  Once the door passes the bottom of the latch it swings to the right (gravity wants to center the metal) and the latch locks the door into place.

In the morning I simply move the latch to the left, raise the door, and hook the pin.

My biggest problem with this design is this:

The shortest amount of time I can set on this type of timer is 30 minutes.  This would mean the actuator would be trying to “run” for the whole 30 minutes and would probably burn out the tiny geared motor.  The resolutions to this could be:

• A digital lamp timer that allows you to set much smaller increments of time.  I think as low as 1 minute of “on”.
• Create a switch activated by the door, so either it powers the actuator when the door is up, or cuts power to the actuator when it falls.

I should also mention that my situation is a bit different than most because my girls have a small run they can access during the day.  The coop door I’ll be opening is actually the door that goes from this small chicken run out to the open backyard.  Opening the door to “the great outside” is the one I want to automatically close.

So, what do you think of this design?  What would you add or change?   I’d love some feedback, especially from the engineering / tinkering types that read this website!!!

Update, 5/7/06:   Alison sent me some great pics of her simple but effective technique (click for larger)

Update 10/27/08: I Finally have a prototype!!!  Automatic Chicken Coop Door Closer

 I host and manage about 50 different websites.   The vast majority are static sites for friends and family that don’t require any backup processes above the daily backup provided by my webhost.   In the 8 years that I’ve been running websites I’ve been with about 12 hosting companies and even though my current server has had amazing uptime and backup availability I don’t like to have all my golden eggs in one basket.   This is especially true with the 5-8 sites that I manage that have very dynamic content populated into MySQL Databases including forums, blogs, etc.

I needed a process that would help me sleep peacefully at night.  As mentioned twice before on this site I’m pretty diligent about computer backups.  In my opinion it is exponentially important to backup the constantly changing information on my sites.  Just a single day’s loss of data could be a huge problem.  For example, on one of my sites, http://www.backyardchickens.com/ there are about 20 new members signing up per day and members are posting about 1,200 new posts per day.  Imagine loosing a week or a month’s worth of members and posts!!!

My Database Backup Process & Software:

1. After trying a few different MySQL backup scripts I found a gem hidden within a blog.  Ameir’s MySQL Backup to FTP and Email script works flawlessly and does everything I need.
2. I have the script setup to run every morning around 3:00 AM EST to do a full backup of about 7 MySQL Databases.
3. The last 3 days worth of backups are kept on one of my secure folders on the server.
4. Each day’s backup is also sent to a completely different web host and server in a different state.
5. Each day I synchronize (using SyncBackSE) my desktop computer with this second web host server and download each day’s backup files.
6. Every month I burn all the backups to a DVD and put them into a fire safe.

 If you’ve been counting that is 3-5 copies of my databases that are backed up in different locations throughout the US.  If you count the daily backups my hosting company provides that bumps the number up to about 7 copies of each day’s DB backups!

Database Backup – Only Half The Battle: 

Well, the process above sounds very impressive, but about a year ago I made an almost fatal mistake.  Learn from my experience and know that your backups are only as reliable as the last time you attempted to restore one of the backups.  

Prior to using Ameir’s MySQL Backup to FTP and Email script I was using an application that had been working fine for me for the previous 2 years.  I hadn’t needed a DB restore for about 10 months when I had someone come in and hack one of my forums.   I attempted to restore my most recent DB backup file and got errors.   I tried to restore one that was 2 days old… same errors.   After trying 2 more backup files I gave up and called my server admin to have them restore their backup… phew!   After this fire drill I discovered that my backup script has stopped working about 4 months prior!!!   I don’t know if it was a change in my hosting environment, the size of the DB’s or some other odd problem, but that’s when I abandoned that application for something new.   Since then I’ve been using Ameir’s script without fail.   BUT, the moral of this story:

1. Backup soon and backup often
2. Frequently try to restore your DB backups to ensure all your hard work and preparation is paying off.

UPDATE 7/27/08:  The other day a member of my community deleted a bunch of their content and said they would try to re-submit it.  They said it would take them a while to get all the pics and text back up.   I said, “Don’t worry about it.” 

In about 15 minutes I had restored a backup from 2 days earlier into a copy of my community system, exported the data the member had deleted, and then imported it into the production site.  Thanks goodness for daily backups!

UPDATE 8/23/08: Regarding backups: For the “static” content of my sites I will occasionally (read very rarely) do a “Full Backup” from within each cPanel hosting account (at least for the top 10 accounts). For the most part I rely on my hosting company for the more frequent backups of my static content…. so a I had a question to ensure I’d sleep a little bit more soundly at night:

What is the most simple way to do occasional (i.e., quarterly) do full backups of all my sites? I’ve read people mentioning using the backup systems in WHM and some talk about using rsync, etc.  These sound good for frequent backups, but I feel I only need to do this relatively infrequently (again, I rely on my daily database backups and the backups my hosting company performs).

After some discussion with one of the NOC engineers, here is what worked REALLY simply for me (using cPanel):

1)  I have a secondary hosting plan at another hosting company (i.e., good backups = all eggs NOT= one basket).

2)  I logged into root cPanel / WHM and edited the backup settings under “Configure Backup”.  I selected all the options to only backup accounts and their respective databases. 

3)  I loaded the FTP info for the other host

4)  I then manually selected my most important accounts to be backed up

5)  I logged into ssh as root and ran the command:  /scripts/cpbackup

6)  For the system to completely tar, backup, and FTP 26 accounts and a total of 3.1 gb of compressed data took about 1 hour in the background.   I didn’t see any obvious changes to server load (I did this at about 10:00 pm PST).

7)  I downloaded all the files to my desktop via my DSL line:  Transferred 26 files totaling 3,146,615 KB in 6 hours 30 minutes 55 seconds (134.2 KB/s).

I don’t expect to do this very often… quarterly at most.  I have a lot of faith in my hosting company and their backups but I still like to cover my bases.

UPDATE 2/2/2009
It has been over a year since I posted this thread so I thought I’d do an update, especially as my BYC forum reaches 22,222 members on 2/2.   From the time of the original post my DB for this forum alone has doubled and then doubled again!   Two of the search tables were taking up at least half of that space so I asked Ameir to write a unique version of his backup script that would backup all the tables except the search tables (which can be recreated if they are dumped).    This cut my backup sizes in half, which has made a huge difference in my ability to do frequent backups and store copies in multiple locations.  This process of daily backup stored in multiple locations really helps me sleep better at night.