Backups: How often do you do them?

Discussion in 'Domains, Hosting and Servers' started by cpvr, Jun 21, 2012.

  1. cpvr

    cpvr Regular Member

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    Well, I contacted my host the other day and told them to put on daily backups, so that's good. Before,I wasn't taking too many backups, but its such a life saver if something happens.

    So, how often do you backup your forum?
     
  2. Creaky

    Creaky Regular Member

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    My host does daily incremental backups to a seperate server. I also do my own backups, daily for the database & weekly for the file system.
     
  3. Dan Hutter

    Dan Hutter aka Big Dan

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    My host takes care of daily backups for me. I pull down my own cPanel backups about once a week or so.

    My thought has always been even if I have full backup do you know how long it would take me to upload the backed up data? It'd be a day or two at least to get back up and running.
     
  4. benjaminp

    benjaminp Regular Member

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    Might be worth thinking about buying a backup service. I can't think of the name of the service I used to use, but I might be able to find it looking through old PayPal subscriptions, but I've just had a little look and rackspace seem to offer a service at $5 pm for 10gb space.
     
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  5. Superboy

    Superboy Most Likely, I'm Insane.

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    Tonight I am going to take my first back-up sine switching to IPB earlier.
    I haven't taken any backups.

    I plan to start doing backups...every other day.
     
  6. Superboy

    Superboy Most Likely, I'm Insane.

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    Forgive me for double-posting, I could not add this to my original post(I can't edit)
    but do you do full backups or partials?
     
  7. benjaminp

    benjaminp Regular Member

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    Forgot to answer the original question. I do backups pretty much every day, though I do forget occasionally. My host also runs a daily backup using r1soft, but I never rely on anyone else, which I believe is the best way to be when it comes to backups.

    Currently my sites are pretty small so the max they ever are is around 120MB which is downloaded in no time.

    Previously I've run bigger sites such as a image gallery which was more like 20GB and for that I rented backup space from the company who's name I forgot and had rsync setup so it only copied new and modified files.
     
  8. Dan Hutter

    Dan Hutter aka Big Dan

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    I was looking for a backup service and couldn't find anyone who offered it at a reasonable price. Everyone wanted quite a bit of money just to store a copy. If Dropbox was available over FTP, I'd back up there.
     
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  9. benjaminp

    benjaminp Regular Member

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    How big are your backups?

    I don't know if you're a member over at webhostingtalk, but if not you should probably take a peek over there.
     
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  10. Dan Hutter

    Dan Hutter aka Big Dan

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    The one I'd worry about is about 15GB. I'd probably want to do a full backup once a week and a DB dump daily. Actually rsync would probably be even better and save me some bandwidth.

    I'm a member of WHT, I'll pop over during hte week.
     
  11. benjaminp

    benjaminp Regular Member

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    I think databases tend to make rsync backups slightly more complicated, but wht is the best place to ask I'd say.

    If your current server has decent bandwidth a small vps might even be an option if your comfortable with harden in it yourself.
     
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  12. Iconic

    Iconic The Original

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    I usually do it 3-4 times a week but lately have been slack with it.
     
  13. eva2000

    eva2000 Regular Member

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    Use to do backups every 8hrs on one server, but these days it's every 24hrs with 2 sets of backups, one local to the server + one remotely transferred backup to a 3rd party remote backup service provider. Using backup scripts I wrote from ground up for my own sets of data i.e. 10 day retention and rotating backups (~60GB data set size just for more busy sites other sites are just file serving ~140GB).

    check out webbycart.com, using them US$99/yr with web site discount coupon for 100GB storage backup space via rsync, ftp, sftp, sshd and even works with 3rd party whm/cpanel plugin for backups. Very flexible as you can sshd into backup space and setup cron jobs (writing own scripts) to help keep disk space, and backup retention disk space consumption in check.

    okay looks like their promo changed http://www.webbycart.com/promos.htm, use to be double quota + 2 months free on yearly payment. But now changed to just double quota without 2 months free.
     
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  14. bauss

    bauss Regular Member

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    I only backed up my forum 2 or 3 times since it has been open for a month. I should backup more often, but I don't. I will backup everyday once we get bigger though.
     
  15. MustangV10

    MustangV10 Regular Member

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    Automatically every 24 hours. Stored off site in a different data centre :)
     
  16. Brandon

    Brandon Regular Member

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    I've only been doing backups once a day, when I had a busier sites I had them every 12 hours.
    I think I have the backups set to be removed after 2 weeks.

    Thankfully (knock on wood) I haven't had to use by backups in a few years. :)
     
  17. Natasha

    Natasha Regular Member

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    I back up twice daily and whenever I'm modifying the forum. I download the 3 freshest back ups once per week.
     
  18. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Regular Member

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    I back up files daily and I *used* to backup the databases daily as well... but I've rolled it back to weekly recently since we've never actually had to ever restore anything from backup... and backing up ~100GB of databases is just plain annoying (especially since we keep each backup for a year).

    That being said, we pull backups from an otherwise unused slave DB server so it doesn't affect the site while it's happening.
     
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  19. Doctor Tech

    Doctor Tech Regular Member

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    Our host has daily backups which are provided to our customers upon request, but it is recommended to make your own backups. Honestly, backups should be generated based on your needs. Do you have a large forum that contains a lot of posts? Or is it just a static site that rarely changes? These factors vary for each site.
     
  20. dojo

    dojo Regular Member

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    I have a cron job that takes daily backups. That's good, since I always forget to do it myself :D
     

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