Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : Backup Solutions

[vect0r]

Just want to get a quick opinion on peoples choices for their backup solutions.

I know of the following options:

1. R1Soft
2. WHM Built in
3. cPremote
4. Custom RSYNC solutions.

Lately I've been testing cpremote, and although it seems to work - the e-mail you get is less than sufficient:

cPremote Backup cron completed on your server. This does not mean your backup completed.

You're not going to want to login to multiple servers every night to read the log - don't even know why it doesn't even attach it.

I've heard people complain about R1Soft's ability to restore mysql databases.. so not sure about that one. Not to mention the cost is fairly high.

I really like WHM's built in backup - except it can bring a servers to it's knees if a user has a lot of files, or some larger already compressed files. Was backing up using that, then copying it all off-site with CrashPlan Pro. Works great, except I got tired of it bringing the server to a crawl for like an hour +.

Wanted to see what others are using/recommending...

[iTom]

R1Soft CDP was great in version 2 (albit the cost was high) can't say that I like version 3 as much, but it's certainly a worth while option, and it's very easy for most people to setup.

If you don't mind playing around with open source software Bacula is a very good option, I use it on a few servers with some great results.

[Amar]

Tarsnap is only thing I will ever use..

[mugo]

I use custom rsync / file and db synchronization and snapshots in any *nix platform. If on Winderz, it all depends on what it's running, but, that comes up about 1 out of 10 times here on WHT...

[CyberLinux]

R1 soft is the best backup solution you can get for your servers.

[M66B]

Instead of rsync you could use rdiff-backup, which does about the same and makes snapshots too.

[ozfingwe]

hello,

our favourite ones are tsm (IBM - very expensive, but you can pretty much do anything with it), and bacula (very flexible, works very well), and of course your occasional custom rsync/rdiff. Only mentioning explicit backup solutions, not dump, replication, or snapshot scripts, etc.

cheers -
oz.

[kevinnivek]

Amazon S3 storage is dirt cheap, and there are many third party tools (commercial and open source) that can facilitate secure (encrypted transfer, and storage on S3) offsite backups.

You could look into cloudberry, s3sync, s3fs, etc that utilize S3.

[SajanP]

Originally Posted by kevinnivek

Amazon S3 storage is dirt cheap, and there are many third party tools (commercial and open source) that can facilitate secure (encrypted transfer, and storage on S3) offsite backups.

You could look into cloudberry, s3sync, s3fs, etc that utilize S3.

I use s3cmd and it has been great. Although I wouldn't recommend it for anything more than a handful of GBs. It does take quite a bit CPU and time to generate the queue, then transfer one by one.

Although, can't complain. The storage is dirt cheap.

[kevinnivek]

Originally Posted by sajanNOPPIX

I use s3cmd and it has been great. Although I wouldn't recommend it for anything more than a handful of GBs. It does take quite a bit CPU and time to generate the queue, then transfer one by one.

Although, can't complain. The storage is dirt cheap.

Definitely. I'm not sure if there is still a limitation on single file transfers at 500mb per file. I know it was in place a while ago.

Its perfect for a quick & dirty offsite backup method, and it offers encrypted transfer and encrypted storage options for added security.

Other options would be much more money unfortunately.

[vect0r]

I've been looking into the S3 options. Are there many (if any) that are capable of doing restores from cPanel / WHM?

(thinking from a user convenience standpoint)

[net]

Originally Posted by vect0r

I've heard people complain about R1Soft's ability to restore mysql databases.. so not sure about that one. Not to mention the cost is fairly high.

Unless you used it, you will never know.

We do not have problem restoring databases with r1soft.


* Moved > Specialty Hosting and Markets.

[excessnet]

so, build-in cPanel + S3 sound good?

I use R1soft, but I find it costly and use a lot of bandwidth. I have my own server, I only lease lic.. I have about 1.5TB of R1Soft backup (I keep a lot).

btw, *subscribing*

[robputt796]

Hi,

I currently use WHM built in backups to an NFS server. This then RSync's to a replicated copy in case the NFS server fails.

If a customer specifies a VPS needs backing up I use a LVM snapshotting tool and RSync.

Regards,

Rob

[cselzer]

Hello,

I would recommend taking a look at duplicity using duply as a command wrapper. Works extremely well, you can pick from a number of drivers to backup to. You can backup to imap, gdocs, ftp, ssh, amazon s3, rackspace cloud, there are many options and if you're savvy in python, you can develop your own drivers to backup to. I personally backup to amazon s3 using duplicity / duply. You can set it up to backup a full-backup every 2 weeks or however you wish, then it will do increments on the off days and it will automatically purge old backups with the settings you setup, very easy to configure and customize. The full backup tool ~1 hour to do about 30gb of data. This is nice and ionice'd, and the increment backup will only backup files that have changed. You can set it up to ignore certain files, a pre and post script. Here is my configuration files for duply:

conf:

GPG_KEY='disabled'

TARGET='s3+http://[user:password]@bucket_name[/prefix]'

SOURCE='/'

MAX_AGE=1M

MAX_FULL_BACKUPS=1

MAX_FULLBKP_AGE=1M

VOLSIZE=100
DUPL_PARAMS="$DUPL_PARAMS --volsize $VOLSIZE "

exclude:

/var/run/**
/tmp/**
/dev/**
/sys/**
/proc/**
/selinux/**

pre: (be sure to modify username / password / hostname)

#!/bin/bash
USERNAME="";
PASSWORD="";
HOSTNAME="";
databases=`mysql -h $HOSTNAME -u $USERNAME -p$PASSWORD -sNe 'SHOW DATABASES'`
mkdir /var/lib/mysql_backups -p
cd /var/lib/mysql_backups
for i in $databases; do
mysqldump --skip-lock-tables -h $HOSTNAME -u $USERNAME -p$PASSWORD $i > $i.sql
done;

post:

#!/bin/bash
rm -rf /var/lib/mysql_backups

You will want the RPMforge or EPEL repo's (can't remember which, but I do use both, lol) for a centos box to be able to install duply and duplicity:

yum install duply duplicity


If you have any questions regarding duply / duplicity feel free to message me and i'd gladly help you as much as I can.