Looking for a free DNN community edition website Backup and restore procedure working with DNN 7 and SQL server express 2008 r2

Question

I am looking for a free DNN community edition website Backup and restore procedure working with DNN 7 and SQL server express 2008 r2.

I usually design and develop website in local PC as my connection speed to the actual server is low. And then I want to publish (deploy) the result in the server. I may need to repeat this procedure a few times as our website is always under development and I need to add new pages or update the existing ones.

I use DNN 7 community edition. I have already googled and have found plenty of commercial tools for this backup and restore. But the free methods seems to be 1.

1. old or
2. not working properly or
3. not a straight forward procedure or
4. very buggy.

I have gone e.g. through the 4 links given in http://www.dnnsoftware.com/community-blog/cid/134680/HOW-TO-Move-a-DotNetNuke-installation

without any success.

Could you please help me 1.

1. how I could develop my website in local PC and then upload the result in the server?
2. And later after adding a few new pages in the local PC how I could sync the result with the server?

Thank you very much in advance for your help and consideration.

. . .

"when using SQL express, if I simply copy the entire local folder to production (including the APP_DATA folder, which contains the database)." ... How I could just save the newly registered users data in the website's database before copying entire local folder to production and restore this data after copying. In other way, I want to update the page contents and added designs but I don't want to loose newly registered users data between two consecutive website updates. I hope could find a working procedure for this because working online with server is very slow due to my connection speed and I have to keep a replica of the website in the local PC and add new pages or programs in the local PC and then update the result to the server when required. The specs of two systems are as follows: local PC: Windows 8 Pro (with admin access) Server (VPS): Windows web server 2008 (with admin access)

Answer 1

1) The easiest way to do this, when using SQL express, is to simply copy the entire local folder to production (including the APP_DATA folder, which contains the database)

2) Repeat step 1, but you'll lose any changes you made in production since the last time you pushed things up.

DNN doesn't really support this type of synchronization as a platform. They tried to offer it in their Enterprise product, but it worked so poorly they scrapped the feature.