Hi,

I'm running a couple of linodes and am enrolled in the linode backups program, so "normally" we should be able to restore our full systems if anything serious goes wrong, right?

We are running apache and mysql and allow users to upload files to our server.

what's the best way to backups mysql and those user files?
We currently dump all mysql databases to an SQL file in a weekly/daily/monthly folder, but that of course is not incremental.

We are looking for a set-it-and-forget-it solution, not a three day full time project.

thanks for all your help and advice!

That sounds like a reasonable plan. Just make sure the dump occurs before the daily backup runs.

I wouldn't worry too much about the incrementality, unless your dump files are quite large (consider using pbzip2 if that's the case). Something like rsnapshot or duplicity could help with managing old versions of user files, especially for the dreaded accidental delete.

Bonus points: consider enabling MySQL's binlog and look at the --master-data option for mysqldump. With this, you might be able to reduce the frequency of mysqldumps.

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