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Online Website Backup Options?

Posted by kdawson on from the backup-is-a-feature-but-recovery-is-a-benefit dept.

pdcull writes "I can't be the only person on the planet who has this problem: I have a couple of websites, with around 2 GB of space in use on my hosting provider, plus a few MySQL databases. I need to keep up-to-date backups, as my host provides only a minimal backup function. However, with a Net connection that only gets to 150 Kbps on a good day, there is no way I can guarantee a decent backup on my home PC using FTP. So my question is: does anybody provide an online service where I can feed them a URL, an FTP password, and some money, and they will post me DVDs with my websites on them? If such services do exist (the closest I found was a site that promised to send CDs and had a special deal for customers that had expired in June!), has anybody had experience with them which they could share? Any recommendations of services to use or to avoid?"

3 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. yeah, use rsync. by SethJohnson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I 100% agree with NerveGas on the rsync suggestion. I use it in reverse to backup my laptop to my hosting provider.

    Here's the one thing to remember in terms of rsync. It's going to be the CURRENT snapshot of your data. Not a big deal, except if you're doing development and find out a week later that changes you made to your DB have had unintended consequences. If you've rsynced, you're going to want to have made additional local backups on a regular basis so you can roll back to one of those snapshots prior to when you hosed your DB. Apologies if that was obvious, but rsync is the transfer mechanism. You'll still want to manage archives locally.

    Seth

    --
    $5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
  2. Wow by crf00 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow! So you are asking somebody to download your website's home folder and database, look at the password and private information of members, and deliver you dvd that is ready to be restored with rootkit along?

  3. Re:Gmail backup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This strikes me as a really dumb thing to do; as both a) using it for data storage rather than primarily email storage and b) signing up for multiple accounts are both violations of the gmail TOS, you are just asking for your backups to not be available when you most need them.