Question about backup stategy.

[lewisb]

What backup strategy should I use to best protect myself against media and node failures? How should I structure my backup procedures to minimize the vulnerabilities they cause? And how can I have them check for both physical and logical errors?

[hans]

while hosts offer back-up solutions
offline backup solutions also work - solutions from USB mem stick to DVD - many ways are possible - even 2nd HDD

another may be less frequently used / less knownb back up procedure of an entire site appeared most efficient to me since years, however it requires at least ONE trustworthy friend with an equal powerful site/server space or dedicated server to have sufficient FREE space for your backup

using rsync in shell via SSH you can backup hundreds of MBs in minutes and later on update your back-up as files are changed even faster since only files with new timestamp are updated later on.

in this case you log in ( hopefully using serverkey auth ) via SSH to ONE - ANYONE of the 2 servers involved and do your rsync with proper syntax.

example

being LOGGED in to server TWO ( back-up server ) - a complete shell-commandline ( all ONE line ) could look like

------- all below on ONE line - NO space before and after @ !!!

rsync -avz --delete-after --progress --stats YOUR-username @ serverone . com:/path/to/your/dir-to-backup-on-server-ONE/ /absolute/path/server/TWO/where-backup-needs-to-be-stored/

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of course i safely assume that all is done on any professional linux systems or any other Unix-like OS (FreeBSD, etc) !!


later back-up-UPDATE could be done via crontab ...