Ask HN: How do you guys backup your Linux servers?

7 points by 147 ↗ HN
I recently put an Rails app into production on a Digital Ocean VPS. I'm using their automated backups, but just in case something happens to their backups I want to keep an extra set of backups for myself. How should I go about this? Should I backup the entire Linux box or just stuff that changes frequently like the database?

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I use rsync via ssh for that scenario and I backup the stuff that isn't provided by the VPS, that is usually a list of installed packages, a dump or snapshot of the database and the relevant deployed files.
https://github.com/bup/bup

bup is the awesome.

It's quick, and does space efficient snapshots. Supports remote operation through ssh (backup remote server locally, or local server remotely). Uses git as backend. Has FUSE, Web and ftp backends.