Hi,

I am exploring hosting options with several different companies. One of the areas I have been comparing is that of backups. Most perform some form of backup. However, what expectations should I have for backups of my site? Downloadable backups are fine unless you have a 200MB site and only a dialup modem. Other hosts have RAID drives but no formal backups performed. Other hosts will provide a restore of a backup of a user site if required. Two of the hosts I am looking are well respected on this forum. This is the only issue I have with both. I'd appreciate the ideas of others.

Many thanks.

As you already stated it depends on your host. They can....
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make no backup
use RAID drives and tell you 'this is backup' (of course it is not)
do a backup over their network
do backup to a second hard disk
do a backup to a tape
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the last one is the most expensive and very uncommon, sigh. Nevertheless, I would recommend to do a backup yourself at least once a week, even if the host does a backup (unless you have 200MB and a dialup modem as you said :) )
Take a very close look at the site of the host for the exact wording of their backup, some try to mislead you. You probably want to know how the backup is done, how often and if it costs something if you want a restore.

write a script that will tar up your home directory and then ftp it to another computer.
If anything goes wrong then its only a matter of min till you re-download the site and untar it and its back to normal...

Works in theory :o)

I dont do that at the moment but i will be soon to my site. (Once i start doing regular updates) (im on about my personal site here, not my hosting one)

See Hosts backup however what happens if you are updating and make a large booboo?
Thats why this appeals to me :]

Doing a search on WHT should find you such a script also.


Regards

Craig