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Ask HN: What's the best backup solution for shared / VPS hosts?

1 points by jonweber ↗ HN
I manage a handful of web services spread across multiple shared hosting accounts and VPSes. I do manual backups on an occasional basis, but the process of backing up all of the web content combined with databases and, in the case of the VPSes, settings and config files, is very tedious and exactly the sort of thing that should be automated.

I've been working on and off on a batch file to automate the FTP backups / database dumps, but I'm curious how everyone else manages offsite backups. Are there any clear market leaders in server-backups-as-a-service, or any open source software that already does this well?

2 comments

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mattbillenstein
For databases I use the appropriate database dump tool (pg_dump, mysqldump, etc), gzip the output, then it gets rsync'd to a backup system, then sync'd to S3 for longer term archival.

For logs, they're rotated daily by logrotate.d and compressed and then it's just the rsync + sync to S3 part. I may also sync to another cloud storage provider in the future.

So, it's not a system per-say - a combination of good open-source tools and scripts.

jonweber
Seems like this would work great for a single server, but it's alot of work to set up a backup system like this for multiple servers (including shared hosting accounts with limited / no shell access).