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Daniel Fischer
Asked: 2010-01-30 18:51:59 +0800 CST

How to backup a linode 360 VPS?

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I have a php/vbulletin/apache server running a 360 instance of linode.

I am wondering what is the best way to remote backup the server in another location?

I'm guessing I have two options, FTP and Amazon S3.

Can anyone provide some example hosts and pricing? Your experience with them perhaps?

I don't want to spend too much money on this... I just want to be able to restore the DB at the least in case something is lost.

The MySQL database is 800mb – what I'm not understanding is the total amount of space I need for the backup. If I backup daily for a week it would be 800x7 but then I get confused when a few people told me about "incremental backups"?

What about a script or is it just plain ol' rsync?

Anyway, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

backup vps linode

6 Answers

  1. About the database - It might be 800MB of data but if you dump it ti file, which you really should do far backing up, that file will compress very well and the result should e considerably less than the "raw" data on disk. You can then use whatever method you like for transferring the resulting backup file (tgz, zip, whatever) to the destination. The most popular choice for this appears to be rsync.

    As to where to back it up, if it was my server I'd back it up to my home or office system and then back it up to tape from there, using a GFS rotation. I just have this thing that if I don't have physical access to the storage media I don't consider a system properly backed up.

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  2. Best Answer
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  3. Amazon S3 is great service for backup. Instead of rsync you can use duplicity. With duplicity you can do incremental backups.

    For simplifying of backups use DT-S3-Backup.

    http://blog.damontimm.com/bash-script-incremental-encrypted-backups-duplicity-amazon-s3/

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  4. I agree that you're best served by using the backup service provided by Linode though if you want to do it yourself, Amazon's S3 is really cheap and simple to use.

    I've been using it for years with various scripts but recently I started using s3fs to mount my bucket on my Linux box.

    http://code.google.com/p/s3fs/wiki/FuseOverAmazon

    With it mounted, I can create simple scripts using Bash and rsync to make backups. It also makes retrieving a file really simple as the backup storage is always mounted.

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  5. Linode actually runs its own internal managed backup program, which should work great for your needs. Check it out at http://www.linode.com/backups/

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  6. Amazon S3 is great service for backup. Instead of rsync you can use duplicity. With duplicity you can do incremental backups.

    For simplifying of backups use DT-S3-Backup.

    http://blog.damontimm.com/bash-script-incremental-encrypted-backups-duplicity-amazon-s3/

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