How often are backups done? Are we responsible for doing it, or what?

We're responsible for backing up our own data. Linode's servers all have RAID-1, or mirroring, across two hard drives. This is not a backup, however; it doesn't cover you in case of an administrative error by either you or Linode, or in case the server catches fire or something.

Here is a quick guide to using rsync over SSH, which would be a good way to back up your Linode to your machine at home. (Somebody on these forums may have pointed me to that link; don't remember.)

Another option is to backup to Amazon S3 which charges, I believe, 15 cents per GB per month for storage and 20 cents per GB per month for bandwidth.

I do this in addition to rsync to my home PC. Actually for my home PC I use rdiff-backup, which goes beyond just rsync. mikegrb did a good guide that's floating around the forums.

For S3 I use

http://s3sync.net

... I run a backup regularly via cron

A bit late but backupninja is the easy way to set up mysql dumps and rdiff backups to a remote host. To my knowledge it only comes packaged for ubuntu and debian, but ti does take the hard work out of performing backups and it's push mechanism is nice and secure (root on the linode, unprivilaged user on remote storage machine)

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