Once you have a production-quality Plone site up and running, there are a few routine tasks that will keep it running smoothly. And, if your server should ever unexpectedly become a smoking hole in the ground, it's nice to have reliable backups on hand. This chapter shows how to do the periodic tasks that will keep you out of trouble; give your users a smooth, uninterrupted experience; and keep Plone and your add-on products up to date.
The first of the periodic maintenance tasks is packing the Zope database.
First, a little background.
Zope's object database, ZODB, is one of its most compelling features. Automatically translating Plone's Python objects to on-disk representations, the ZODB divests developers of a whole layer of concerns they would otherwise have to spend time on: for example, setting up an object-relational mapping layer like SQLAlchemy.
Out of the box, the ZODB stores its contents in the Data.fs
files...