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What do you use to backup your dedicated servers?
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What do you use to backup your dedicated servers?

What do you use to backup your dedicated servers? I am looking for a secure backup solution.

I've used rsync in the past backing up to amazon s3, that was ok. If I have to go that way again, I will.

I am looking for alternatives.
I was reading about r1soft backup

I need something that will backup the entire server, everything not just some directories, but databases, OS everything.

I also want something that's easy to restore in case of an issue.

A few years ago I had a hard drive failure. This server was being backed up to amazon s3. Everything was configured however the backup failed to backed the /cache directory of the CRM so I was unable to restore it.

What are your suggestions?

buyvm backup kvm vps. If so, what scripts, software do you use to backup your server?
I also have a kimsufi servers I won't be using soon so I may be able to use those as backup.

Comments

  • BradyHBradyH Member, Host Rep

    we just set up r1soft to so our backups now. Going to another dedicated server in a different data center than our racks that we have. In the past on our Dedicated servers we just added an extra drive like a 2 TB HDD or something and just did a server image back up to it as well as the cpanel backups. but now we are using the r1soft set up.

    Thanked by 1sysamy
  • Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep

    We use bacula. Much more stable, in my experience, than R1soft

    Thanked by 1sysamy
  • Everything was configured however

    The lesson here is that whatever solution you use, you must test your backups.

    I still use manual scripts with rsync to take snapshot based backups which may be less friendly than you want (let me know if not and I'll go into more detail), but for key things I have them automatically restore to VMs. For instance my Zimbra install backs up to a remote service, and a copy of that VM (with less RAM and such as it doesn't need to serve real users) every day wipes itself down and restores from the remote backup. The last step of the restore sends a mail through itself so if it hasn't restored cleanly I don't get the mail (i.e. if the service hasn't been able to start) or the checks in the mail lists errors. I can also login to that instance manually from time to time to make sure everything looks OK. That VM could even be used as a DR site if needed (I'd just need to update DNS and I'd lose at most a day of updates).

    Thanked by 1sysamy
  • I use duply / duplicity with some "pre" and "post" scripts for database backups and such, targets are mainly either hubiC or Amazon Cloud Drive.

  • gnupg, rrsync, tar, ftp, webdav

    I don't have automatic restoration and automatic dated deletion I'm afraid.

  • No matter what server it is, be it a LES box or a dedicated server, I would always use Amazon Cloud Drive :)

    Thanked by 1Rolter
  • @MeAtExampleDotCom said:
    I still use manual scripts with rsync to take snapshot based backups which may be less friendly

    how many days backup do you retain?

  • Here are some options for you:

    R1Soft as you mentioned http://www.delimiter.com/landingpage/r1backup/ you can get your first month of 100GB as a free trial to test it out and confirm it works as you want it to. One thing I have noticed is that R1Soft is slow to restore so bare that in mind if you need a fast restoration.

    Delimiter has ObjSpace which is a drop in replacement for AWS S3, I personally use this for backups using duply/duplicity but this will not give you a bare metal restore option. http://www.delimiter.com/landingpage/objspace/ there is an article on our wiki which explains how to set this up.

    You can also use Hashbackup with ObjSpace, I am currently testing this on one of my servers.

    Thanked by 1sysamy
  • linuxthefishlinuxthefish Member
    edited January 2016

    Keep it simple, nothing worse than having your backups fail because some config option was changed in the latest update to your backup software.

    I use MySQLdump and SCP to do hourly, daily and monthly backups, and rsync for monthly backups of static website content, configuration files and home directories.

    Thanked by 1sysamy
  • We do full node backups twice a week for our servers. We run our own backup setup but also use r1soft to save backups at a different location. So we basically backup our backups, you can never be too careful

    Thanked by 1sysamy
  • @seaeagle said:
    how many days backup do you retain?

    For most of it that doesn't change a lot so snapshots are cheap: currently 14 days, 7 weeks, and 7 months. The three blocks have different references so not all the snapshots have the same base (that can be risky: if they share the same base then corruption that affects one version of a file could affect all versions in all snapshots). As I've got plenty of space since rearranging/expanding everything a few months ago I'm considering adding a forth reference and alternating the daily snapshots between two. I might also increase the number of weekly and monthly snapshots too.

    In the backups of Zimbra there are a few large files that change every time and are only log/stats info so they are archived more aggressively (they aren't absolutely needed to restore service). Other log files and database dumps can also be expensive to snapshot via hard-link too (I'm not doing any deduplication in a finer grain than file level) so they have less granular retention too.

    Most of what I backup is all mine (mail server, web server, source repos, photos & other personal files) so I know and control the load - if you are running VMs, databases, or shared hosting for other people (which I assume most people here are) it gets harder to plan space use.

    What I have is almost certainly overkill, but I'd rather do too much than risk having done too little!

    Thanked by 1seaeagle
  • nfnnfn Veteran

    I use rsnapshot to pull content from vps's to a kidéchire and have another kidéchire that rsync with the first one .. safe than sorry

    Thanked by 1vimalware
  • I use dropbox. Don't judge me.

  • I've got a backup script called Watson, if you're interested.

    Sherlock said: I use dropbox. Don't judge me.

  • FTP backups of all accounts to another VPS at time4vps

  • Do you use a script for amazon cloud drive? How do you restore?

    @theroyalstudent said:
    No matter what server it is, be it a LES box or a dedicated server, I would always use Amazon Cloud Drive :)

  • @sysamy said:
    Do you use a script for amazon cloud drive? How do you restore?

    • Mount ACD on /media/amazon

    • Gzip whatever I want, place it in the folder neatly

    • When I need it (not very often) I can just manually restore, since the contents are usually different, and varies from many WordPress websites to my torrents and configs.

  • Dropbox and simple script

  • Bacula.

    Took a long time to learn how to use it, and set it up properly, but is quite worth it.

    Thanked by 1Jonchun
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