Comments on: Webmasters nightmare #2 - Server and backup failure

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:29:36 +0000

I come from a background of high uptime systems, i.e. we had dedicated fibre laid for 30km’s to link a hotswap backup site to the live system. This may seem extreme but when you have 5000 terminals hooked up to the one server downtime becomes pretty expensive.

I run a dedicated server in Canada which is my main server, I also have another server (much cheaper and lower spec) located in the US.

On the main server I run a daily cron job to dump all the mysql databases to a file. Then from my spare machine I run rsync over ssh to copy over all the website files and database dumps on a daily basis. This ensures that at most I will lose 24 hours data.

Just for safety sake I also back this up to my mini mac at home using cron and rsync every day.

So if my main machine goes down with no chance of recovering very quickly I can just point all the domains to my backup server and run my sites from there until the main server is back up.

I wouldn’t recommend this setup for everyone though as it isn’t cheap, but losing all your data isn’t cheap either.

By: Christoph

Christoph — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:46:12 +0000

I use bqbackup for remote storage. rsync runs from my server and moves all the data offsite. I also backup to a secondary hard drive in case the mirrored drives my sites sit on go south. From the secondary drive I move the data to SAN storage at my provider (ThePlanet.com).

By: Justin Cook

Justin Cook — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:35:18 +0000

I would add to this that if you have cpanel hosting, you can easily automate full backups (which will cover dynamic and static sites) to a remote FTP server. This can be your home computer, but more safely you should just pay for a secure FTP backup solution.

By: Amit Bhawani

Amit Bhawani — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:20:52 +0000

Apple Time Machine fully named as Time Capsule Wireless Backup Service

By: Amit Bhawani

Amit Bhawani — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:20:09 +0000

Online Backup Services are always recommend for your websites and Apple Time Machine for your local HDD data on Mac

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 23 May 2008 08:36:38 +0000

I’ve had backups running for over 12 months now using my own custom script that does a backup of all files and databases every day, and downloads them to my personal RAID0 file server. I’ve had to rely on it a few times, definitely saved me lots of headaches.

By: Keith

Keith — Fri, 23 May 2008 04:05:01 +0000

Basically, I does a routine backup every now and then. Each compressed data is close to 2GB each time. Hence, it was relatively time-consuming to perform full backup on a daily basis.

However, a full backup is definitely a must. Somehow, you wouldn’t know when you could have changed a line of code at any particular day.

By: Peter Kalinauckas

Peter Kalinauckas — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:39:32 +0000

after reading your article i have backed up all my sites. Cheers for the heads up!

By: Bruno Silva

Bruno Silva — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:34:54 +0000

Hi Al!

I’m hosted with Wiredtree atm and I use a few extra GB’s (at another ftp server) to automatically backup my sites on a daily basis.

Also, I retain weekly and monthly backups and download a copy to my own office once per week at least.

Seriously people…

If you can’t afford $10-$20 to do a decent backup, get another biz…

By: StephenB

StephenB — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:11:07 +0000

I use a combination of mysqldump and mysqlhotbackup to backup a VB forum and CMS daily of 2.5-3Gb in total (mysql) to a second hard drive on a dedicated server along with weekly full file (5Gb) offsite backup via ftp and daily changed file backups.

As the site is global I have to pick the quietest time to do it staggered over an hour. Mysql takes about 15mins.