In another thread, 3510 mentioned that his hosts disk went kaput and they don't seem to have a back-up. This brings up a good point, it seems to me that the best idea is to have an off-site back-up of all client sites, whether it be a back-up to another server or just to a home computer. Are any of you doing this? If so, what do you find to be a good way of doing the back-ups?

I'm assuming you use some sort of incremental back-up system so that you don't have to back up EVERYTHING every time.

Hi Louis,

Yes, it's always a great idea to do offsite backups. You can do so buy purchasing backup space at dedicated server providers or purchasing a server for the sole use of off-site backups.

Originally posted by Louis Prima
In another thread, 3510 mentioned that his hosts disk went kaput and they don't seem to have a back-up. This brings up a good point, it seems to me that the best idea is to have an off-site back-up of all client sites, whether it be a back-up to another server or just to a home computer. Are any of you doing this? If so, what do you find to be a good way of doing the back-ups?

I'm assuming you use some sort of incremental back-up system so that you don't have to back up EVERYTHING every time.

I use an Ensim reseller panel and I can set up preset automatic tar backups. I set the backups to ftp to another server. I also do manual automatic backups and have them ftp to a webspace on a third server. I also download the backups and archive them to a CD.

For my cpanel server/s I do weekly off-site back-ups to another server in another state, all automated through WHM, for my FreeBSD hosting I do all manual backups to a 2nd hard drive locally.

I'm moving toward having a dedicated server to store just backups at some point.

:)

Okay, a slight variation to my original question then :)

What would be a good way for a reseller, using WHM/Cpanel, but who doesn't have access to WHM's auto back-up feature, to back-up client files offsite?

I'm trying to find some sort of incremental back-up solution, so that ALL files don't have to be backed up EVERY time.

Louis: Cron? SSH? There's a variety of methods.. you could also manually backup each account by logging into them with your root password!

DanX: But incremental back-ups can't be done with cron can they? And logging into each account... well that would take quite a while, and still wouldn't solve the problem of having to download EVERY file EVERY time.

Surely there's some easy way to do this... Is there such a thing as an incremental FTP program, i.e. one that recognizes by file size and date which files have been modified and only downloads those that are new or changed?

try rsync. I've not got round to it yet, but it's on my to-do list. I've had a play with it between Windows machines. I'm looking to do something similiar between Linux / cpanel accounts and a home PC.

Alternatively, I used to use a package called sitecopy, this did an incremental ftp.