Evening All, Recently I had an experience where I had to resort to a server backup on my host in order to get my forums up and running again. Anyway since then I have been constantly thinking of ways how best to backup my database files. I have 5 databases totalling around 200mb or thereabouts in pure sql form so adding gzip which severely drop that by say close to 100mb I would be thinking. I am currently downloading database backups every couple of days and delete anything older than a month. My problem is if something were to happen to my host for whatever reason *touch wood* I would be stranded having to upload my databases to the server again @ 15kb/sec which as you could imagine would take quite sometime and take the site down for a fairly large chuck of the day. I guess my question is does anyone use an external source for offsite backups and who would you suggest? Given the content of the databases I would want to keep it fairly secure so I don't really want to go trusting just anyone. Of course other alternatives other than offsite backups are more than welcomed. TIA Cheers Darren
I'm not sure exactly what is the best solution, but here are a few things I've seen discussed. Some have set up some type of cron job to backup to a secondary server. And then there are these choices which are more computer/server related: http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/documentation.html and then this one: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ Both FREE!!! Be sure to let me know if you end up using one successfully. KG
Unless you are on a dial-up, your minimum upload speed would be 50KB/s (DSL). Cable would be even faster. At this rate, 100MB would only take 3-5 minutes. You can also set up replication between your IDC machine(s) and your office/home machine(s). It's easy to back up a replicated database, since you can stop it at any time, make a binary or a SQL backup and then compress the result to make the transfer go faster. J.D.
Thanks for that, I reckon rsync is the way to go, this is currently how I have it setup at present but with password prompts as I could never get public key authentication sorted out. I might have another crack at that. That sounds very much the same as rsync? Needless to see I will be exploring that avenue as well. I'm using cable in Australia remember We are well behind the rest of the world when it comes to internet and speed. The general speed for uploads we have here are as follows 8kb - ADSL, 16kb - ADSL, 32kb - ADSL and finally 16kb - Cable) which is what I'm on. Having said that though there are a couple of companies out there offering faster speeds which have only been released very recently which would be ideal but unfortunately due to 'technology blockers' I am unable to make use of the offer. With that in mind we have 2 Cable providers which have a complete monopoly on the market and plenty of ADSL providers which generally go through the same wholesale carrier (Telstra) meaning very little competition that doesn't really help the situation. Sorry about the long reply.