Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Data Backup

[lachtan]

Hi I`am looking for simle solution to backup my data, if I have two disks on server, no mirorring.

[RobTheGolfer]

What OS does the server have? If Linux, you can have a simple bash script copy the data over to the drive every so often.

[lachtan]

yeah Linux of course .] I was discovered rsync, but I don`t know if there is something better. It`s bad to simple copy disk every night ?

[Kristy]

I don't know about anything better but rsync is great.. I'd use it any day. At the very least, it won't take up as much time as just a regular copy since it won't re-copy files that havent been modified.

Also, if you have WHM, you'll want to take a look at the BackUp option there.

[bqinternet]

I'd just use rsync to synchronize the 2 disks each night. Most people don't realize that you can use rsync locally.

[hiryuu]

Keep in mind that a local copy is good for recovering the occasional oops, but you should still keep an off-site copy. Many human-error events, especially by the datacenter staff, will take out both drives.

[dollar]

You might want to look to GNax for offsite solutions. Do a search and you will see they seem to have a lot of respect here at WHT.

[jcall]

One easy way to do off-site hosting is to use a cron-launched script to FTP the backups off to some simple $10/month hosting account. That way, the backup is on a different network, different server, and you have full backups.

Does rsync keep an up-to-date copy only? (I'm asking because I haven't yet had much experience with it.) If so, then if you have file corruption, wouldn't rsync simply mirror that corruption?

-jared

[Kristy]

Yes, it's an up-to-date copy and as far as I know it doesn't archive.

[jcall]

IMO, then, rsync is not a backup solution. It's a mirroring solution.

-jared

[dollar]

Originally posted by jcall
One easy way to do off-site hosting is to use a cron-launched script to FTP the backups off to some simple $10/month hosting account. That way, the backup is on a different network, different server, and you have full backups.

Does rsync keep an up-to-date copy only? (I'm asking because I haven't yet had much experience with it.) If so, then if you have file corruption, wouldn't rsync simply mirror that corruption?

-jared

As mentioned above it does keep an up-to-date copy. But then again FTPing all backups can also leave you with corrupted files. You would use RSync to only send over what has changed instead of FTP'ing the entire site each time. Take each rsync backup and tar it all up with a timestamp and you are good to go.

[Captian_Spike]

The best way to go is simply do a rsync mirror of the entire drive. Thats what I do, it ensure there are no files left out. On top of this I am able to have incremental daily, weekly, and monthly backups all stored in seperate directories. You can also create a script to switch off directories to keep a few days archives on hand, then just update the oldest one. Same thing could be done for the weekly and monthly ones.

[Hostidge]

I prefer the CPanel backup tools