I've recently purchased a new Cloud based VPS over at eUKHost, and thought it was about time I got into this "backup" thing I've been hearing all the hip kids talking about, and was wondering what others are doing for server backups.
Realisticly, I'm probably only going to be hosting a few small scale client websites and few bits of my own.
So far, I have setup the following:
File Structure
I currently store all backups on the C drive, an a Backups folder, in this folder I have a Tip folder, which holds the most recent backup, and then an Archive folder. The Tip folder, is sub devided in Db and Files. In the Archive folder, it broken down into sub folder Daily and Monthly.
C:\ - Backups - Archive - Daily - Monthly - Tip - Db - Files
Database
To start, I installed a couple of helper stored procedure to help within backing up database found here http://ola.hallengren.com/Documentation.html#DatabaseBackup. I then have a .bat file, which runs the following script to do a full backup of all DB tables
I then have this .bat file set as a schedules task to run daily at 3am.
Files
For backing up files, I am using Cobian. This is set create a backup of the wwroot folder every night at 3:30am and in C:\Backups\Tip\Files.
Archive (Daily)
For an archive of daily backups, I have setup a Cobian task to auto backup the C:\Backups\Tip folder every night at 4:00am which is copied to C:\Backups\Archive\Daily. This is set to archive to a .7z file, and backups are kept for 7 days.
Archive (Monthly)
On top of the daily archive, I have a similar task set to run once a month, which saves a copy of the tip to the C:\Backups\Archive\Monthly where backups are stored in 7z format, for 3 months.
And this is where I currently am. My VPS is cloud based, so in theory, it should never actually go down, but I'm sure that doesn't include corruptions of the OS, so I will need to look into some kind of offsite backups.
So, what is everyone else doing? Is there something masivley flawed with my setup? Or could it be simpler? What else should I be backing up? Let me know what you think.
My first response to this would be move backups and data to a drive that is completely separate to your operating system! I do this on both my local machines and my server and it has saved my bacon on many occasions. That way if your o/s goes down or needs to be rebuilt there is less chance of you losing your data with it. I will try and respond in more depth on my current setup later on today.
Not sure how / if I could do that with my current setup as the VPS is just setup with one drive. It is cloud based though, so the drive shouldn't fail. Unless I missunderstood the issue.
Even though your VPS is in the cloud, make sure to also do an off-site backup. I'm sure you have a great hosting provider, but the horror stories of previously seemingly reliable services going down the tank due to a hardware failure have scared me enough to never rely on one single party.
I am cloud based also. I don't know about your host but I can create as many virtual drives as I like up to the amount of disk space I pay for, I can also swap them between virtual machines so I could have a backup server waiting to fire up and all I would need to do is attach my data drive to it and I am back on-line(in theory).
Whilst your drive shouldn't fail your operating system is not bullet proof and still susceptible to corruption. I am not an expert in this field but talking from experience, sometimes learning the hard way. Even from an organisational point of view I find it helps to separate my operating system and data in much the same way that your presentation and business logic should be seperated in your development ;)
Just trying to weigh up the options at the moment for offsite. I use CrashPlan at home, so could see if I could install that and have it under the same account. I'm also a bit of a cheap skate though, so if there is a way of doing something cheaper, I would prefer it, so maybe something like a home PC downloading over night might be an option.
Sounds like a good setup. I would probably consider some sort of off-site backup, just to be sure.
I currently have a server for the client sites (deployed and live) and another server for the sites in development. I haven't moved to hosting in the cloud yet, but I'm seriously thinking about it after the CG2010 Amazon EC2 session.
The database backup is done every night at 1:30 AM, I keep the files from the last 7 days on the local filesystem.
At around 2:00 AM DeltaCopy synchronize the database backup folders and site folders with the other server in the setup (changing files, adding files, not deleting). That way I have a mirrored backup on the other server, and hopefully both servers wont die at the same time.
The SQL backup script and DeltaCopy tasks are all run with regular Windows scheduled tasks, there's no reason getting a tool for this IMO.
Matt, one way to save money that I use is to backup everything to my local NAS over night and it works very well. I can then have an off-site backup of my NAS. As mentioned earlier I will try and respond in more detail about my setup as the feedback would be useful.
I use or used to use JungleDisk with Amazon S3 storage for local backups.
I have a dedicated server with eUKhost. Funny you mention backups because I'm in the process of getting eUKhost to set automated backups of the server (got 25GB free with the hosting plan). Might be worth having a word with them to see what they can do for you? But I also create DB backup as well on a separate drive on the machine on a scheduled task. Going to look at Cobain for file backups, thanks for the tip.
EUKHost have a reasonably priced off-site FTP back-up facility. Never had to actually use it in thankfully, but I have it set up on both my dedicated and VPS servers with them to back up just databases (MySQL and MSSQL) as the storage for filesystem files can become a little pricey compared to other options. It can be set up quite flexibly, but mine is set to back up nightly, and keeps back-ups for 1 week. So e.g. if I need to revert a database back to how it was last Tuesday I can do that very easily.
I also run JungleDisk Server edition in order to back up all databases again, and also filesystem files (in fact I back up the entire dedicated server via JungleDisk). I use JungleDisk desktop for my local PC, and have always quite liked it's simplicity and value (uses Amazon S3 for the storage) and noticed the server edition recently, which also seems to work well and is similarly good value.
What I would say is that if you get EUKHost to set up their offsite back-ups - check the configuration as they cocked mine up first time and it ended up storing all my database backups daily, without recycling on a weekly basis, so I found that my disk space was eaten up quite quickly with months worth of SQL back-ups piling up.
Bijesh - Oooh, will go check whether I get backups with my package.
Simon - Asked support and they say I can't split my drive, so I'm limited to just the C:\ drive. RE offsite, I could, as you say, backup to my NAS, but then get my current CrashPlan on my local machine to back it up to their online backup. Bit long winded, but should work. Do you know of a "behind the scenes" type of ftp tool for bringing down the archives?
Rather than split an existing drive I was thinking more of adding an additional virtual drive?
I have a ReadyNAS Duo which has built in capabilities for backing up via various different methods including FTP and I think uses RSYNC. I do daily incrementals and weekly full backups. In your above scenario would it not be better if possible to install your backup solution on the server and backup direct from there as they will have a much better connection and saves a step in the process.
A cheap (free) and dirty solution might be Gmail which gives you 7gb of free storage, if you can find a way of getting your db back ups zipped up and sent via email (and the data is not sensitive).
Hehe, I know, but I'm a yorkshire-man, I can't help it.
If I used off site backups, would I be right in thinking it's pointless doing the multiple daily/monthly archives, as they would already be backed up remotley wouldn't they? What do you think?
What's your Web Server backup strategy?
Hi Guys,
I've recently purchased a new Cloud based VPS over at eUKHost, and thought it was about time I got into this "backup" thing I've been hearing all the hip kids talking about, and was wondering what others are doing for server backups.
Realisticly, I'm probably only going to be hosting a few small scale client websites and few bits of my own.
So far, I have setup the following:
File Structure
I currently store all backups on the C drive, an a Backups folder, in this folder I have a Tip folder, which holds the most recent backup, and then an Archive folder. The Tip folder, is sub devided in Db and Files. In the Archive folder, it broken down into sub folder Daily and Monthly.
C:\
- Backups
- Archive
- Daily
- Monthly
- Tip
- Db
- Files
Database
To start, I installed a couple of helper stored procedure to help within backing up database found here http://ola.hallengren.com/Documentation.html#DatabaseBackup. I then have a .bat file, which runs the following script to do a full backup of all DB tables
I then have this .bat file set as a schedules task to run daily at 3am.
Files
For backing up files, I am using Cobian. This is set create a backup of the wwroot folder every night at 3:30am and in C:\Backups\Tip\Files.
Archive (Daily)
For an archive of daily backups, I have setup a Cobian task to auto backup the C:\Backups\Tip folder every night at 4:00am which is copied to C:\Backups\Archive\Daily. This is set to archive to a .7z file, and backups are kept for 7 days.
Archive (Monthly)
On top of the daily archive, I have a similar task set to run once a month, which saves a copy of the tip to the C:\Backups\Archive\Monthly where backups are stored in 7z format, for 3 months.
And this is where I currently am. My VPS is cloud based, so in theory, it should never actually go down, but I'm sure that doesn't include corruptions of the OS, so I will need to look into some kind of offsite backups.
So, what is everyone else doing? Is there something masivley flawed with my setup? Or could it be simpler? What else should I be backing up? Let me know what you think.
Matt
PS Cultiv has a great article on his blog about his current setup http://www.cultiv.nl/blog/2009/12/30/a-basic-backup-strategy
My first response to this would be move backups and data to a drive that is completely separate to your operating system! I do this on both my local machines and my server and it has saved my bacon on many occasions. That way if your o/s goes down or needs to be rebuilt there is less chance of you losing your data with it. I will try and respond in more depth on my current setup later on today.
Not sure how / if I could do that with my current setup as the VPS is just setup with one drive. It is cloud based though, so the drive shouldn't fail. Unless I missunderstood the issue.
Matt
Even though your VPS is in the cloud, make sure to also do an off-site backup. I'm sure you have a great hosting provider, but the horror stories of previously seemingly reliable services going down the tank due to a hardware failure have scared me enough to never rely on one single party.
Thanks for the mention by the way! :-)
I am cloud based also. I don't know about your host but I can create as many virtual drives as I like up to the amount of disk space I pay for, I can also swap them between virtual machines so I could have a backup server waiting to fire up and all I would need to do is attach my data drive to it and I am back on-line(in theory).
Whilst your drive shouldn't fail your operating system is not bullet proof and still susceptible to corruption. I am not an expert in this field but talking from experience, sometimes learning the hard way. Even from an organisational point of view I find it helps to separate my operating system and data in much the same way that your presentation and business logic should be seperated in your development ;)
@Cultiv - No problem, it's a great article.
Just trying to weigh up the options at the moment for offsite. I use CrashPlan at home, so could see if I could install that and have it under the same account. I'm also a bit of a cheap skate though, so if there is a way of doing something cheaper, I would prefer it, so maybe something like a home PC downloading over night might be an option.
Matt
Sounds like a good setup. I would probably consider some sort of off-site backup, just to be sure.
I currently have a server for the client sites (deployed and live) and another server for the sites in development. I haven't moved to hosting in the cloud yet, but I'm seriously thinking about it after the CG2010 Amazon EC2 session.
I'm running the sites off MS SQL Express, so I'm using this script for running backups: http://expressmaint.codeplex.com/
The database backup is done every night at 1:30 AM, I keep the files from the last 7 days on the local filesystem.
At around 2:00 AM DeltaCopy synchronize the database backup folders and site folders with the other server in the setup (changing files, adding files, not deleting). That way I have a mirrored backup on the other server, and hopefully both servers wont die at the same time.
The SQL backup script and DeltaCopy tasks are all run with regular Windows scheduled tasks, there's no reason getting a tool for this IMO.
/Steen
Matt, one way to save money that I use is to backup everything to my local NAS over night and it works very well. I can then have an off-site backup of my NAS. As mentioned earlier I will try and respond in more detail about my setup as the feedback would be useful.
I use or used to use JungleDisk with Amazon S3 storage for local backups.
I have a dedicated server with eUKhost. Funny you mention backups because I'm in the process of getting eUKhost to set automated backups of the server (got 25GB free with the hosting plan). Might be worth having a word with them to see what they can do for you? But I also create DB backup as well on a separate drive on the machine on a scheduled task. Going to look at Cobain for file backups, thanks for the tip.
Hi Matt,
EUKHost have a reasonably priced off-site FTP back-up facility. Never had to actually use it in thankfully, but I have it set up on both my dedicated and VPS servers with them to back up just databases (MySQL and MSSQL) as the storage for filesystem files can become a little pricey compared to other options. It can be set up quite flexibly, but mine is set to back up nightly, and keeps back-ups for 1 week. So e.g. if I need to revert a database back to how it was last Tuesday I can do that very easily.
I also run JungleDisk Server edition in order to back up all databases again, and also filesystem files (in fact I back up the entire dedicated server via JungleDisk). I use JungleDisk desktop for my local PC, and have always quite liked it's simplicity and value (uses Amazon S3 for the storage) and noticed the server edition recently, which also seems to work well and is similarly good value.
What I would say is that if you get EUKHost to set up their offsite back-ups - check the configuration as they cocked mine up first time and it ended up storing all my database backups daily, without recycling on a weekly basis, so I found that my disk space was eaten up quite quickly with months worth of SQL back-ups piling up.
Hope this is useful.
Bijesh - Oooh, will go check whether I get backups with my package.
Simon - Asked support and they say I can't split my drive, so I'm limited to just the C:\ drive. RE offsite, I could, as you say, backup to my NAS, but then get my current CrashPlan on my local machine to back it up to their online backup. Bit long winded, but should work. Do you know of a "behind the scenes" type of ftp tool for bringing down the archives?
Matt
Rather than split an existing drive I was thinking more of adding an additional virtual drive?
I have a ReadyNAS Duo which has built in capabilities for backing up via various different methods including FTP and I think uses RSYNC. I do daily incrementals and weekly full backups. In your above scenario would it not be better if possible to install your backup solution on the server and backup direct from there as they will have a much better connection and saves a step in the process.
Simon - I could, but that would count as an extra machine, and so would cost me extra =) (Remember, I'm a cheap skate)
A cheap (free) and dirty solution might be Gmail which gives you 7gb of free storage, if you can find a way of getting your db back ups zipped up and sent via email (and the data is not sensitive).
Rich
Hehe, nice idea Rich. On a similar note, I could drop box it?
Oooh, no, I wouldn't want it to sync with my general account. Unless I made an account specificaly for it.
Cheap is sometimes a false economy ;)
I do know of a company that uses Dropbox to sync their backups, not a bad idea actually but has a cost involved if you have a sizeable amount of data.
Hehe, I know, but I'm a yorkshire-man, I can't help it.
If I used off site backups, would I be right in thinking it's pointless doing the multiple daily/monthly archives, as they would already be backed up remotley wouldn't they? What do you think?
Matt
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