Site backup

[Shazam]

Here's a promising offsite backup solution you might want to consider:

Remote Backup using Rsync or FTP

The interface is old-fashioned, but the service is relatively inexpensive and, based on my brief testing, quite robust. They charge you $5 per month for up to 10GB and $20 per month for up to 100GB. For both VPS and dedicated, this is an option definitely worth examining further.

In case you're wondering, after the first backup is done, it's incremental, meaning only the files that have been changed or added are backed up.

However, if you don't know SSH, the setup might be a little strange, although their instructions are pretty clear what to do.

[roger]

For a simplified solution, I blogged about it here: Automatic FTP Backup System - A Very Simple Solution | Ubuntu Linux Help

Maybe a few of you could take this a few steps further. For example, we could use a script to transfer via SSH as well.

Hope it helps someone! - Cheers.

[Shazam]

Originally Posted by roger

For a simplified solution, I blogged about it here: Automatic FTP Backup System - A Very Simple Solution | Ubuntu Linux Help

Maybe a few of you could take this a few steps further. For example, we could use a script to transfer via SSH as well.

Hope it helps someone! - Cheers.

Nice, but I'm talking about something more useful because the system I'm talking about does incremental backups; just what's changed or added. That's a whole lot better and, since it is offsite, you have an added ounce of protection. Your method evidently saves all the files to your computer.

[Scott]

How do you do a cpanel restore with an incremental backup?

[roger]

Originally Posted by Scott

How do you do a cpanel restore with an incremental backup?

That's the right question!

[Shazam]

Originally Posted by Scott

How do you do a cpanel restore with an incremental backup?

In this case, incremental means that only the files that were changed or deleted are backed up. In the end, you have a full backup of your site/server/whatever. Makes no difference.

[Scott]

I understand what incremental backups are, but I am assuming you will have a set of LARGE files and then many sets of small incremental files.

Does this mean you have to combine them all to rebuild the large file you use to restore a cp backup?

Right now I am doing just full backups weekly. Less than 4GB for me, so no big deal.

[Shazam]

Originally Posted by Scott

I understand what incremental backups are, but I am assuming you will have a set of LARGE files and then many sets of small incremental files.

Does this mean you have to combine them all to rebuild the large file you use to restore a cp backup?

Right now I am doing just full backups weekly. Less than 4GB for me, so no big deal.

In this case, the files are unified, so you're not dealing with one large backup and lots of small ones. So this shouldn't present a problem.

[Shazam]

I got this from another forum, a cron script that's useful for having backups of smaller sites emailed to you on a regular basis. It's no good for larger sites, but you could perhaps alter this to upload, say, to a .Mac account I suppose. But I don't speak that language.

I've had a few PM's asking for the script I used to automatically backup the public_html folder, then email it. So here it is. I run this script via a cron job once a week and it sends via email to my gmail account.

Bear in mind for larger sites this wouldn't be a workable solution due to email attachment size.

I created a directory off the home folder called website_backup, then created a file within that folder called website_backup.sh

You make the folder and file name what you like, just change the code accordingly.

Here are the contents of /website_backup/website_backup.sh
* #!/bin/bash
* rm ~/website_backup/*.tgz
* tar czf ~/website_backup/website_backup_`date +%Y_%m_%d`.tgz ~/public_html
* mutt -s "Website Backup `date +%Y_%m_%d`" -a ~/website_backup/website_backup_`date +%Y_%m_%d`.tgz youremail@youremail.com

In my case, the whole process from the time the cron job runs until the email (8mb attachment) is in my gmail account is about 5 seconds.

Hope you can make use of it or if someone has a better way, please make suggestions.

[Scott]

Just remember to download these files. Gmail shouldn't be trusted with your backup handling, security, etc.