Hi I would like to setup automatic monthly backups of the files and databases on my VPS, I would like the files to be backed up to another server via FTP and to my home computer. I have webmin installed as well on my VPS, if that helps in facilitating setting up the backup. What are my options? Thanks

BDW my home computer is Win 7 based

Monthly backups? Can you really afford to lose 29 days' worth of data in the worst case?

rsync and its family (rdiff-backup, rsnapshot) are capable of backing up only those files that changed since the last backup, so you don't need to transfer all the files over and over again. This makes it more feasible to perform daily or weekly backups, instead of monthly. Problem: rsync doesn't work on Windows unless you mess with cygwin, which is a rather delicate business.

Another popular backup option is Amazon S3. Command-line tools such as s3cmd (with the "sync" option), combined with some shell scripting and cron, would give you automatic backups to S3. I back up one of my sites using this method, twice daily.

Backing up the database is as simple as producing a database dump (e.g. mysqldump) and including the dump file with your regular backup.

Thanks, would I be able to set up rsync for regular backups to another hosting account through FTP, instead of Amazon s3?

So there practically is no solution to backup my linode to windows?

rsync is its own protocol, it's the same sort of thing as FTP; it can't run over FTP. That's like taking the train on a boat. And now I want turbolifts...

Anyhow, you can rsync home at a regular basis, or use something similar like hybinet mentioned.

Personally, I have a fileserver running Solaris with ZFS. Every night, my server logs in to my linode and syncs all the data down, and then does a ZFS snapshot. The result is nightly incremental backups with trivial access to any one of them; ZFS lets you access snapshots by simply entering a virtual directory for the snapshot without executing any command; just a "cd" right into the snapshot. It's fun.

Of course, there's the whole OpenSolaris-is-dead issue...

I'm not sure if rsync supports FTP. Most of the time it is used with SSH. Also, the other host might not like it. Most shared hosts have rules against using their services for anything other than hosting a web site.

You can run rsync on Windows if you install cygwin. But you have to use it in a special command prompt (very inconvenient), and Windows doesn't preserve file and directory permissions so you might need to make adjustments if you ever need to restore your backup.

Or you can install Linux on Windows, using VirtualBox. Then you can do whatever you want on your own virtual Linux computer.


You can do something similar in Linux too, if you use btrfs. But it's still experimental.

Ok thanks for the informative replies

I do hope that one day, btrfs can replace zfs, but at the moment there are a few concerns:

1) As you said, it's experimental

2) It's not clear from documentation for btrfs (since there isn't any), but it looks like accessing a snapshot in btrfs involves unmounting the current filesystem and remounting it with a different subvolume. This makes it useless for most use cases, because I have to reboot a machine just to grab some data from a snapshot of the boot drive, or take my whole storage array offline just to grab some old files. Even if you don't have to unmount it (perhaps you mount the volume read-only?) it's a lot more complicated. Hopefully this gets resolved, but this complaint may just be the result of btrfs being poorly documented

3) It's developed by the same people making ZFS, and I'm cautious as to why Oracle is doing both ZFS and btrfs at the same time

Issue 1 will undoubtedly be resolved. Issue 2 will hopefully be resolved, even if it's only done by automated tools that take care of everything automagically. Issue 3 is a concern, but it's GPL'd, so...

Hopefully I can move to btrfs some day.

There are actually some GUI programs listed on Wikipedia for rsync, a few of which are listed as working on Windows: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync#Graphical_user_interfaces

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Kris the Piki Geeker

duplicity is a handy tool for backing up data to a "dumb" location. At the very least, you could have it back up to a local directory on your server and then scp the resulting files home.

Keep in mind that backing up to home means restores are going to take a very long time. But it's better than nothing, especially if it's just a part of a complete backup plan.

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Seconding the duplicity recommendation. It supports S3 as well as everything else and encrypts with GPG. Also check out rdiff-backup, which provides a sort of mirror with diffs.