Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Running a Web Hosting Business : Backup Solutions: Best / Recommended Methods?

[HC-Sam]

If you would like to make backups of client accounts, and I'm not referring to any RAID configurations ... what would be the best way to go about it?

I'd like to hear a few suggestions before I mention what I had in mind.

-Sam

EDIT: And this is internal, I'm not talking about outsourcing either.

[stjoenetworks]

If you are using Cpanel/WHM just setup WHM to do your backups and then get a account with BQ Backup http://bqbackup.com and then have your backups remotely stored with them.

They are a great company to use for external, off-site storage.

Not sure what your setup is but if you are looking for a off-site/backup solution I'd recommend looking at them.

ene

[HC-Sam]

Couldn't I just do rsync backups on my own, and store them off-site on some type of external hard drive?

[TQ Mark]

Do you own the servers? Are you asking for what type of hardware you should backup to, or what software you should use to do the backups? R1soft.com is good and gaining momentum for online backups in the webhosting world. Many people use rsync for basic backups.

[Calibur747]

If you use cPanel, I would recommend http://forums.cpanel.net/showthread.php?t=58096 highly.

Then, with the backups stored on your 2nd hard disk, you can setup a nightly rsync to just send the changes in the full backups to your local machines. Then you can decide if you want to go another step to DVD and then to physical file storage of them.

[SC-Daniel]

I suggest using Bacula... If you can get a VPS or dedicated server to backup your data to, Bacula is a great choice...

Bacula, however can be quite complex, so be sure to read up on it before attempting to set it up.

[network82]

All our client data / servers have several layers to backup.

First is hardware, Mirrored Raid.

Second, Full Disk Image SnapShots taken twice a day, held on spare backup drive on each machine.

Third, Each server has a daily Backup ran at night, stored on NAS. We keep them one week (ie, rolling 7 days worth of backups per server)... Every Monday we take all the sunday backups, and p2p them to our office servers where we archive them for about a month as an offsite backup.. Takes a couple of days but are easy to fit on a £100 250Gb USB harddrive if a DC visit is required.

If a server went down, we can usually have everything restored in 20mins using the disk images, usually no more then 12hrs out of date. All our servers at the DC have bootable USB sticks plugged in them, our DC offer KVMoIP for an hourly fee so we can restore whilst the server has failed OS. Done this on two servers and works great.

[richardhay]

We back up to a spare machine that serves only as a recipient of our backups. It is a slow machine that has two large hard drives. And, we use WHM's scheduled backups to keep all of our servers sending a full backup on schedule to the backup machine.

[fs-itsolutions]

We can recommend storeBackup if you want to safe your backup on an external hdd or something like this.
It is like rsync.

[network82]

Check out Amazon S3.. http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261

[cws_mm]

Originally Posted by network82

Second, Full Disk Image SnapShots taken twice a day, held on spare backup drive on each machine.

If a server went down, we can usually have everything restored in 20mins using the disk images...

Is it expensive (in terms of CPU resources etc.) to take a full disk image?

Have you ever had to implement this?

Thanks.

[nhouck]

I'm looking for software that can backup files remotely from data centers anywhere, and only backup files that are different from any other file in the backup set. I.e. if there are 100 users with 99% the same files, I want it to only backup the 1% of files that are different and have 1 copy of the other 99%. For game servers, with each install anywhere from 2-12 GB each I can't be backing up all of the files, especially over WAN.

[network82]

Originally Posted by cws_mm

Is it expensive (in terms of CPU resources etc.) to take a full disk image?

Have you ever had to implement this?

Thanks.

It can be, but in general its nothing to worry about.
Its actually very clever how it works.. I can usually have each server images in 20-30 minutes.. It does take up allot of diskspace storing the server images though. and in my case, bandwidth for transferring them off-site.

I've recently been looking at amazon's S3 backup storage solution which looks quite promising for storing my image backups.

[cws_mm]

Hi,

This is probably great for getting online quickly instead of hoping something is an easy fix and trying to correct it. At worst case you have the regular backups.

You can create an incremental disk image can't you?
What software do you use for making these disk images?

If so I suppose it should not take too long.

I wonder if Amazon S3 will allow you to backup an incremental disk image directly to their space.

Thanks.

[network82]

Originally Posted by cws_mm

This is probably great for getting online quickly instead of hoping something is an easy fix and trying to correct it. At worst case you have the regular backups.

Exactly, you can have a server online again in under 20mins.

Originally Posted by cws_mm

You can create an incremental disk image can't you?
What software do you use for making these disk images?

At the moment we use acronis which is a little expensive but I think does support incremental images (will tripple image time though as it has to compare everything.).

We recently found these guys (http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/backup.htm) who's software is cheap and actually really really good.. We're in the process of developing an addon for our control panel so we can easily deploy and manage our disk imaging, and then deploy it directly onto Amazon S3.

Originally Posted by cws_mm

I wonder if Amazon S3 will allow you to backup an incremental disk image directly to their space.

Interesting idea, but I think they have some clever data caching thing going on because they use huge server clusters. Also if it was possible, the bandwidth write speed limitation would make the imaging process take days to read and write all that data...