Data dumps/Generating dumps

If you want to backup a wiki yourself, there are a few options.

You can take a snapshot of the database periodically; restoring from one of these is the quickest way to get back on line in case of data loss.

MediaWiki 1.5 and above includes a command-line maintenance script dumpBackup.php [1] which can be used to produce XML dumps directly, with or without page history.

The scripts which manage our multi-database dump process are available in our source repository but would need some tweaking to be used outside of Wikimedia.

You can generate dumps from public wikis using WikiTeam tools.