Online Website Backup Options? 173
pdcull writes "I can't be the only person on the planet who has this problem: I have a couple of websites, with around 2 GB of space in use on my hosting provider, plus a few MySQL databases. I need to keep up-to-date backups, as my host provides only a minimal backup function. However, with a Net connection that only gets to 150 Kbps on a good day, there is no way I can guarantee a decent backup on my home PC using FTP. So my question is: does anybody provide an online service where I can feed them a URL, an FTP password, and some money, and they will post me DVDs with my websites on them? If such services do exist (the closest I found was a site that promised to send CDs and had a special deal for customers that had expired in June!), has anybody had experience with them which they could share? Any recommendations of services to use or to avoid?"
yeah, use rsync. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the one thing to remember in terms of rsync. It's going to be the CURRENT snapshot of your data. Not a big deal, except if you're doing development and find out a week later that changes you made to your DB have had unintended consequences. If you've rsynced, you're going to want to have made additional local backups on a regular basis so you can roll back to one of those snapshots prior to when you hosed your DB. Apologies if that was obvious, but rsync is the transfer mechanism. You'll still want to manage archives locally.
Seth
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
How quickly do you need it back? (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing a lot of people forget when they propose backup systems is not just how quickly can you take the backup, but how quickly do you need it back?
A sync to your own PC with rsync will, once the first one's done, be very fast and efficient. If you're paranoid and want to ensure you can restore to a point in time in the last month, once the rsync is complete you can then copy the snapshot that's on your PC elsewhere.
But you said yourself that your internet link isn't particularly fast. If you can't live with your site being unavailable for some time, what are you going to do if/when the time comes that you have to restore the data?
Re:Gmail backup (Score:5, Insightful)
This strikes me as a really dumb thing to do; as both a) using it for data storage rather than primarily email storage and b) signing up for multiple accounts are both violations of the gmail TOS, you are just asking for your backups to not be available when you most need them.
Actually, his only problem is.... (Score:5, Insightful)
... his slow internet connection, and wants to pay something to not have to move files over his slow internet connection.
How about:
- Pay for a hosting provider that DOES provide real backup solutions....
- Pay for a real broadband connection so you CAN download your site....
As with most things that are 'important'...
Right, Fast or Cheap - pick two.
Re:Shared hosting (Score:2, Insightful)
there are dozens of legitimate reasons that someone could be saddled with this kind of web host.
No, sorry. Not a single one.
Re:Why not use an online solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, it will - but that problem you will have with a provider-based backup as well. If your data gets corrupted without you noticing, your backup will 'save' corrupt data...
What you can do to at least partially save yourself is to at least make sure the rsync users are jailed and can only rsync to the target directory, not being able to access anything else.
Re:Shared hosting (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why not use Suso? (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing that I've learned though is you can not rely on a hosting company's backup to necessarily be timely, reliable, and/or convenient. If you want to backup multiple times during the day, have multiple generations of backups, be able to very quickly restore if need be, all can make the hosting backup unattractive. I'm not saying yours is that way, just with some of the hosting companies I've dealt with in the past.
This also doesn't take into consideration the best-practice of having your backups off-site for disaster recovery. It doesn't help very much to have your backup server/drive/whatever 1U down in the rack when the building collapses, has a fire, floods, etc destroying everything in it.
Re:Shared hosting (Score:3, Insightful)
I love when I ask a question, and the question gets totally ignored and people insist on the exact thing that I specifically excluded as an answer.
I agree that there are countless legitimate reasons why you would be "saddled" with a Control Panel based webhost. There are also countless legitimate reasons not to continue using that host, having backup requirements that the webhost doesn't support is one of them. Maybe not so explicitly stated by the flowering examples of conventional wisdom above, but if you're going to mysteriously exclude "Run. Fast. Now." from your list of acceptable answers then you run the risk of painting yourself into a corner.
Business continuity undergirds much of system administration, much more than choice of webhost, but if you are unable to make a business case for why the company should change webhosts in terms of, "If something happens, we're screwed," then you should at least not be excluding rational choices and at most should not be dealing with the BC issues of the company.
I don't know how cheap webhosts go, but your implication is that there is no two-way communication allowed with the server itself, possibly there's just an "Upload Site" file selector in the Control Panel? If so, then you need to realize that you have only client-level access and so your backups are going to be client level. If you need anything on the backend like DB dumps then you need a way to get to them, which you don't seem to have.
If, as you allow in your question, the host does in fact give you a shell but no rsync then the answer is simple: "scp -r". For database backups you'll either need a DB interface or utility to do your dumps, or be able to copy the datafiles themselves (janky and unreliable quality). For low-bandwidth situations a good stopgap would be to get a shell host from which you can copy your backups to another location over a larger pipe.