without having to setup my own server. Are there companies who offer this service? Or does the specific data center where the VPS host server resides have to offer it themselves? Dave

Dave,

Check with your data center first. They may offer this service and it certainly is the easiest and fastest way.

Otherwise, try other providers of R1 and see if they list backup services. You can do it over the internet, but if you have a lot of data it may cause a large usage bill. Short anwer, yes other data centers can back you up without you having a server.

Thanks,
Rob

Thanks, Rob. That answers my question. I just have 25 or so very small sites so for now bandwidth would not be an issue. I am a user of True Image for offline backup needs for me and my clinets, and like the way it backs up everything in a manner that all can be restored with virtually no disks/passwords/anything else needed and be back to a fully operating machine. As far as i can tell, R1soft does the same thing for servers and virtual servers. One question I had is cold R1soft restore to a different provider in case, say, the first provider decided to leave the hosting business. I realize that I should ask R1soft probably :)

It also seems like a good business opportunity to offer to VPS users this backup service. I am anxiously awaiting VG 3.0 of R1soft as I think they will have some nice changes in this arena.

Thanks, Dave

Hello,

You can restore files to different servers, i.e. moving hosts, but bare metal restore needs to be done on similar hardware. Also, Linux is easier to reconstruct at the system level in remote locations than windows.

Thanks,
Rob

Thanks. As much as I love Windows because I know it, I do really like Linux for hosting needs. Just seems to get the job done and there are many who are able to help.

Checkout EZPZHosting.co.uk they have Cpanel reseller accounts with R1Soft integrated. Their VPS also have R1Soft integrated. I believe that Solarvps was going to bring that service with their Linux VPS service.

Thanks, I will check those out. I was more curious than anything as to how all of it would work. Backups are super important.

Greetings,

Most VPS providers are probably backing up the node that your VPS resides on in case of hardware failure. Even given RAID10 which provides much required redudancy in the case of a single HD failure, R1Soft (or some sort of backup) in general is nearly a requirement. I'd go as far as saying that most managed providers are doing some sort of backups however it never hurts to ask them.

That being said, it still never hurts to keep backups of your own data.

Why not switch your vps to a cloud computing solution? you don't have to get a whole server to start, but the great this about R1 is that if you get to the point in which you need a whole server to yourself you won't have to migrate, move, reconfigure etc. You can add as many extra storage sites as you wish at any time in any geographical area that your provider has servers. Cloud computing sounds like it'd be a great stepping stone for you. You can easily assimilate your current vps onto a cloud quickly and easily. R1Soft isn't just a backup platform, it's high availability, scalability, bare metal recovery, the list is virtually endless.

All good suggestions, thanks. I think a better title for my thread may have been, "I would like to explore the possibility of getting my VPS backed up with R1soft." The way it is now, it seems like an immediate need which it is not. I have some backups of my own, and I know Aquarius does backups and I have my VPS there, but coming from Windows which has Acronis as a bare metal backup which i have some experience with I just figured I should learn about R1soft especially as i read that the new version will NOT require its own server and can backup the server it is installed on to a USB drive I think it was, or a separate disk of some sort. I thought this might be an interesting thing to try for my onsite clients as a possible Acronis replacement or option.

I am barely getting familiar with my VPS, and I am aware of "clouds" and it does seem very exciting. VPS.net seems to have a slick setup. I am just not aware of the benefit as I can upgrade my VPS with Aquarius fairly easily for RAM and Disk space, not sure about CPU, that is a good question. But, sorting thru the HYPE of CLOUDS, why are they so much better and is the VPS.net could the same as say the Rackspace cloud? I am sure there are others too. Are they all the same, all different? I find the web hosting technology to be the most fascinating of all. I am feeling my way to setup a more formal hosting business after I get a feel for the technology and try to actually force some knowledge into this sometimes rock hard brain :)

I have about 10-15 clients and I know for sure that is not enough to stay alive, so I am keeping my day job of supporting computers onsite for now. Dave

The best thing to do is go to each person who's offering cloud services and find out what it's backbone equipment is. Find out all of the features etc and then weigh your options. There are several different cloud operating systems, controllers and or platforms to choose from. The most important things are expandability and the high availability features. Imagine that you have an empty build table and you need to build the perfect server for your application. Lets say for some odd reason you need 4Ghz cpu power with 13GB RAM and 26GB of disk space. you can pick and choose all of these options as you like. 6 months from now your needs change to 20Ghz CPU and 12GB RAM and 200GB Disk space, it can be changed instantly. What if you have 2 geographically diverse locations, one in the USA and the other in France. The cloud guest is based in the USA has great times to the USA and France, not so much. You can replicate the USA guest on the fly and park a copy in France and install load balancer's that send all of the traffic from the appropriate areas to the correct servers. You can do this as many times as you can possibly handle 24 / 7 / 365. Goodbye power failures, goodbye hardware failures, goodbye disk corruption. Hello high availability.

Got it, thanks. A bit ahead of what I need now, but I see it is the future, at least part of it. I think a regular VPS will also have a place. I do love RAM and always like to have plenty of it :) I used to sell it at Egghead Software for $50 per MEG. Man, it was hard to come by even 4 MEGS back then, which was a sweet spot even though Windows or Dos could only sort of use it. I regress :)

I personally think that vps is on it's way out. It will be replaced with how big of a slice would you like and would you like redundant storage with that? As the hardware gets cheaper and cheaper the rates will keep falling. On another note, my back in he day moment was the excited feeling I got when we (the dell technical staff circa 2000) got the news about the new Zuul desktops that were rolling out. 1Ghz of processing power and 256MB RAM. What a day for computing!!!