HYPERAXE

I could never emphasize enough the importance of backups to everyone. I had bad experiences of data loss by ignoring the importance of this very basic administrative task, the worst is actually losing a whole website data due to my leniency.

Your web hosting or VPS provider may try to impress you about their servers configured with RAID 10 super fast SATA disks. It’s true that this kind of configuration offers some level of protection from data loss but for your own sake, just keep your own backups since they would surely not be liable for any data loss as most of their TOS (Terms of Service) states.

Now that I decided to get a new VPS to host my web sites and project files, creating a backup strategy was the next thing for me to do after installing everything I needed on my server. It’s good that I had my personal backup since just after a day of my VPS being setup, a problem occurred with my provider which erased all my data and restarted my server with a bare minimal OS. I tried asking them about data recovery, but they were very sorry that since I am on na unmanaged VPS plan, they don’t keep snapshots of my files. Even though their servers are configured with RAID 10, this would only protect my data during disk failures, but not on situations wherein I would need incremental backups.

For most Linux administrators, “rsync” would be one of the top tools to use for doing bandwidth friendly remote backups since it only synchronizes the files that have changed and not every bits of data you wanted to backup.The only problem with rsync is, if your source data gets corrupted, then your backup data would also gets corrupted if a synchronization occurs after the data corruption.

Then I found this great script that makes use of rsync but overcomes the said issue on data source corruption, which is called “rsnapshot”. It also allows you to easily configure rsync based backuo on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly intervals using a single configuration file. Most Linux distros may already have ready made binaries of this script so you can check it out. My home server runs Ubuntu and I was glad that I was able to install it with a simple “apt-get install rsnapshot” command.

It didn’t take me long to configure everything and now I have a daily incremental backup of my whole site, databases, and project files to my home server. Another option I am thinking is to subscribe to remote backup services. Here are some companies I am considering:

RSync.Net - Their pricing plans are a bit expensive, wherein $1.60/GB per month is the cheapest, but they do offfer some cool stuffs such as MySQL database dump support as well as Subversion over SSH support, aside from the usual SCP, FTP, WebDav, etc. support.

BQBackup - Their lowest plan is at $5/month for 10GB of storage space, but unlike Rsync.Net, they don’t have MySQL database dump and Subversion over SSH support.

RsyncPalace - They are BQBackup resellers but offers a much cheaper alternative pricing plan of $6.95/month for 15GB of storage space. Obviously they have the same server setup and support. Actually, I tried this company before but had some problems with Samba mounts and intermittent slow bandwidths. But on the good side, they had always been helpful and generally the remote backups works well most of the time. I just decided to unsubscribe from them since I decided to try out a home file server for backups instead of hosting it remotely.

Well, as I’ve said guys, just keep your backups all the time ‘coz you’ll never really know when you’ll be needing them.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Techno Stuffs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.