Comparing backups is useful in the following scenarios:

• You have 2 backups of your site and you’r enot sure which one you want to restore
• You want to compare a backup to your current site
• Your site has been hacked and you want to know what has been changed

Comparing files

On your Linux web server command line, type:

diff -r -x cache www.backup1 www.backup2

In this command www.backup1 and www.backup2 represent the 2 file structures you want to compare.

Also -x cache allows you to ignore the cache folder, since it is almost guaranteed the caches will be different.

An even better way, may be to just ignore the *.page files in the cache, like this:

diff -r -x "*.page" www.backup1 www.backup2

Comparing databases

The easiest way is to export the database to a file backup and then compare the files.

To be documented.