Hi Guys,

As I am starting to host more and more business critical applications on my linode I recently decided that I need a more robust backup plan than my current one.

My current backup plan is to download a copy of everything to my local computer when I remember. There are times when I have not done this for a few weeks due to one thing or another.

I do like the idea of taking a 'snapshot' of the system at certain times by cron, and storing them in a separate location or two, but am under the impression that you can not take a reliable snapshot from inside a running machine, if at all.

If there are any pointers, gotchas or other issues that anyone could help me with when taking a full system backup then it would be helpful.

I do know about the Linode backup facility but I am in Dallas, not Newark, so I can not take advantage of that yet. When it is rolled out to Dallas I will consider getting it.

Personally I use Amazon S3 to take snapshot and back them up

For my website stuff I using rsync between 2 of my servers to back each others data up... so assuming they dont both die at the same time I should be ok

Currently, there is nor reliable way of getting a snapshot of a running SQL server - except perhaps using LVM snapshots.

I currently use a cron script which stops MySQL, and backs up everything (except /dev, /tmp, /sys and /proc) using rsync to http://rsync.net/

im in the process of moving my mysql stuff to LVM to take advantage of MYLVMBACKUP.. works well. Tells mysql to flush to disk with a read lock, snaps, unlocks.. happens in a few seconds.. Database goes back to use while the snapshot is tar/gzipd

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ServerAdmin - www.our-lan.com
"Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy whilst looking for a really big stick"
"In my experiece, any attempt to make any system idiot proof will only challenge God to make a better idiot"