The Acquia Cloud platform where we host the sites you build in SiteFarm is a busy place—as of this writing we have over 1,000 sites in various stages of operation, from just instantiated to somewhere on the development timeline to well-established sites on the live web. It's the ones in the first and middle groups we want to focus on for a moment.

A lot of work goes into building and maintaining your sites. Sometimes it involves creating sandbox sites or demo mock-ups to test issues or build examples for your colleagues to review and argue over. The issue is that some site instances never get developed, or you had a single internal purpose for it, but it's been abandoned. Or, you did a redesign, launched it successfully, swapped out your sites, but now the old one is still sitting in your group folder a year later. Just in case. 

The problem is that the sites take up space and can have an impact on the overall performance of the service, and that affects the entire SiteFarm community of users. Help us keep the 'Farm clean; pull your weeds.

Delete unused sites

Please delete sites you are no longer using.

Downloading your site

If you're at all concerned about having access to the content of a site you're no longer using, such as in the last example, you have two options:

1. Use a tool to download a static version of your site, like SiteSucker or HTTrack.
2. Take a back-up of your site's database and, in case of a dire emergency, request that the SiteFarm team import the database to a site on your behalf. Please only use this option as a last resort; a considerable amount of work goes and coordination goes into this process. If you do take a download of that site's database, keep it somewhere safe and accessible to the site managers on your team.

Downloading the database

1. Select Backup the site from Site Factory’s site card drop-down list, located to the right of the Log in button.
2. Once the site has finished backing up, an email will be sent with a link to download the site.
3. Click on the link or go directly to https://www.ucdsitefarm.acsitefactory.com/site-archive-list
4. Click the “Download” link which will download a tar.gz file.
5. If you are on a Windows computer, you will need a program like 7zip http://www.7-zip.org/ to open the file.
6. Extract the contents to your computer and rename the folder to something useful. Save it in a place accessible to all of your site managers in case of an emergency.
7. If you need to import this database to a site, please contact the SiteFarm team for assistance, but only after exploring all other alternatives.