CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

i've been spending a few hours here and there testing CiviCRM on a copy of my organization's web site over the past few weeks, and i think i'm ready to actually make it go live. but i have two questions that are probably really basic -- but which i can't find answered elsewhere.

first: should we worry about how secure our members' contact information will be, living on our web server rather than on an old PC in the office? my executive director asked me about this and i didn't really have an answer; though i'm a big proponent of civiCRM i hadn't thought about it. i assume that our data are secure to the extent that our drupal admin user accounts are secure, right? is anyone aware of people or bots trying to log in and steal information from civiCRM databases?
we don't have a particularly large or well-maintained database of names + addresses anyway, but the ED is extremely concerned about the privacy of the list.

second (those of you who are real web admin people will hopefully have an easy answer): i've got a working version of civiCRM installed on a copy of our site, as stated above. now what do i do — copy the database and files over to my active drupal installation? or do i leave the site copy aside and just repeat my installation steps, but this time on the live server?
in general, what are best practices for actually taking major changes live?

thanks for any answers!
thanks also to the civi community: i have been so impressed with the software thus far. really capable and not even that intimidating. now i just have to make it simple enough for our non-tech-savvy volunteers to use...

For the second question: my recommendation would be to repeat your installation steps on the live server. Although you can actually make a backup and move the stuff, it is quit cumbersome. Partially because we so far find the instruction after we messed up rather than before we do anything.....but still...Instruction on moving can be found here:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Moving+an+Existing+Installation+to+a+New+Server+or+Location

OK, it sounds like i'll just be repeating the installation of civiCRM on the live server, especially since i (perhaps stupidly) installed civiCRM into the copy of the drupal mySQL database (as opposed to installing it into its own database), making it much harder to move ...

as for security, i'll do some more research elsewhere and let you know what i find out & what steps i take to make sure it's secure.

thanks so much, responders!