[Zope] Newbie Q: How do you backup the data? Where is everything anyway?

[Frank Joerdens]

Greetings! I just installed Zope and Plone and am trying to get the hang
of it by playing with it and working my way through the available
documentation. I just figured out that folders, paths and files (e.g.
/thefirst/portal_skins/plone_styles/ploneCustom.css - "thefirst" is the
Plone site I just created) don't actually represent actual files in the
file system (this is on a Linux box), but seem to be stored somwhere
else, apparently in the ZODB (my reading seems to suggest this).
However, I don't know where this object database stores its information
- var/Data.fs does not exist on my system (one article I found said that
this was the place where the ZODB data was to be found) - and even if I
found it, I'd still need to know how to back it up. With my favourit SQL
database, PostgreSQL, for instance, you are disencouraged to simply copy
the directories where PostgreSQL stores its data since this would break
the transactional integrity (or you'd have to stop the server to do it
which isn't really optimal . . . ). Thus you have a special utility,
pg_dump, which dumps your data into flat files that can be read back
into the server if need be.

Hence my questions: Where are the data to be found and how do you back
them up? Is there a way to read them out into a file/format that is not
binary, that can be viewed with a text editor as a plain file?

Regards,

Frank