ALWAYS Save a Site Backup To Your Computer!

rsync is pretty useless if the files were mistakenly deleted from the server that is being backed up.

Specifically: delete some files on the server by mistake, then when rsync runs it will delete the files in the back up.

Yes, this has happened to us.
 
Peggy said:
ok y'all are going way over my head now... :confused:
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It is a real easy, rsync simply duplicates whatever you do to your server - onto another designated place, such as another hosting account... A mirroring function.

delete files on the hosting account, when rsync runs, it will delete the files you deleted.
add files on the hosting account, when rsync runs, it will make a copy of those new files.
 
Anthony Parsons said:
Peggy, if you want free hosting, I will setup an account for you on my server and you can run your blog... it is backed up daily, external, and keeps each day uniquely for an entire week. No catches.

You will obviously have your own cpanel interface.
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Anthony you are a sweetheart, thank you. If it was just my blog, I'd probably take you up on your offer. But I have my blog, test xenForo forum, and I'll be opening a new forum in January, that I expect to be pretty popular. So I'm going to stay with my current host.

But thank you so much for your very generous offer.
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Dean said:
rsync is pretty useless if the files were mistakenly deleted from the server that is being backed up.

Specifically: delete some files on the server by mistake, then when rsync runs it will delete the files in the back up.

Yes, this has happened to us.
Click to expand...

After I rsync to the remote server, I copy the contents to another folder on the remote server.
 
Dean said:
rsync is pretty useless if the files were mistakenly deleted from the server that is being backed up.

Specifically: delete some files on the server by mistake, then when rsync runs it will delete the files in the back up.

Yes, this has happened to us.
Click to expand...

This is why rdiff-backup exists. Same benefits of rsync with extra reverse diffs so you can restore lost files. :)

We use git + gibak (to save and store information git doesn't track) to manage our backups, since our site lives within a git repository. The backups are placed on a different physical disk for resiliency, and also synced offsite nightly. This means should we experience a disk failure, we can be back up in a matter of minutes, not hours/days.

For MySQL, we do replication -- devoting one slave to the task, which we don't use in production. This allows us to do backups with no downtime. Every 12 hours we SLAVE STOP to perform a 'mysqldump --opt' on the slave, restart replication and copy the backups offsite. This gives us consistent backups without interfering with the live site. We also run log backups every half hour.

As someone else mentioned, it's also a good thing to regularly test your backups. We do so once a month.
 
Jason said:
As someone else mentioned, it's also a good thing to regularly test your backups. We do so once a month.
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This is something I have not done in a while :oops:. I was looking for something to do this weekend, looks like im going to test my backups!
 
Dean said:
rsync is pretty useless if the files were mistakenly deleted from the server that is being backed up.

Specifically: delete some files on the server by mistake, then when rsync runs it will delete the files in the back up.

Yes, this has happened to us.
Click to expand...

One of the reasons why I use dropbox to backup my server - it keeps deleted files as well as a revision history on demand. And you get free external storage along with it :)
 
Well with all this talk I decided to test my datafile.
It looks like it's too big for bigdump.
The last time I used ssh and line commands, I restored my live database with an old backup. :(
I lost two days of posts.
I need a safer solution.
 
Peggy said:
Save your backups to your computer.
You'll be glad you did.
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Ive always done that. I used to use free hosts back in the day and they would go down then come back up with data lost or they would just shut down completely so I learned early on to save backups along with any and all site files on my computer and/or a flash drive.
 
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