I haven't done a full server restore yet, but yes, I've done several spot check restores, including full directories, and everything worked like a charm.

Thanks for the link. I signed up for beta, looks really promising.

_________________
http://eightyfiveconsulting.com

Thanks for sharing! That looks really promising.

Hey everyone, Opsmate founder here. I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have about the service.

I take Linode's backup service for what it is. They say that RAID1 (or 10 for that matter) is about availability, not backup, right? That's exactly why I'm paying Linode a (very humble) extra so that I can take a snapshot whenever I mess around with a production server. If that [apt-get dist-upgrade] goes wrong, I can redeploy my Linode in a matter of minutes and begin the brainstorming process about where exactly it went wrong. Availability, baby! (Actually, I'd clone the Node from my snapshot for what, couple cents, stage the upgrade there and then upgrade on production).

That said, I do not rely on Linode's backup service as my sole backup. That'd be silly, come on. Eggs and baskets, remember? If worst comes to worst (Linode backup went FUBAR, Linode itself went belly up, 3-letter agency pulled an entire rack including the backup server, you name it...) I rdiff to one local and one remote server anyway. Granted, this will take time to be up and running again, so there goes the availability but my data is safe.

As for Opsmate, it does look great really, but I find the pricing rather steep. I do realize there's a lot of compression and optimization going on, but that really only applies to the OS and log files. The actual data, on my Linode at least, is oh so very not compressible (RAW photo files anyone?). My Linode 4096 (196 GB storage) runs me $80 plus $20 backup. Backing it up to Opsmate would cost me another $75 for 200 GB storage. (Like I said, my data doesn't compress well, so the 100 GB plan won't do). Well, frankly, for $75 I'd rather just spin up another Linode in another datacenter and rdiff.

Bottom line, I love Linode, they've been extremely reliable in my experience and I appreciate their backup feature for its convenience. I will not exclusively rely on it for reasons mentioned earlier, so I do keep my 2nd and 3rd backup and backup of the backup elsewhere, but I won't pay another $75/mo for it.

It isn't really difficult to write a script to back up to S3 on your own. Here's an example:

#!/bin/bash

BACKUP_DIR="/backups"
MYSQL_FILENAME="$BACKUP_DIR/prod-$(date +%m%d%Y).sql"
DOCROOT_FILENAME="$BACKUP_DIR/prod-$(date +%m%d%Y).tar.gz"
ETC_FILENAME="$BACKUP_DIR/etc--$(date +%m%d%Y).tar.gz"
BACKUP_HISTORY="365 days"

echo "Creating backups..."

mysqldump -u username --password=password database > $MYSQL_FILENAME
gzip $MYSQL_FILENAME

pushd /opt
tar cfz $DOCROOT_FILENAME www/prod/ scripts/
popd
pushd /etc
tar cfz $ETC_FILENAME php* nginx* sphinx* my.cnf
popd

s3cmd put ${MYSQL_FILENAME}.gz s3://your-s3-path/ && rm -f ${MYSQL_FILENAME}.gz
s3cmd put $DOCROOT_FILENAME s3://your-s3-path/ && rm -f $DOCROOT_FILENAME
s3cmd put $ETC_FILENAME s3://your-s3-path/ && rm -f $ETC_FILENAME

echo "... done."
echo
echo "Cleaning up old backups, deleting files older than $BACKUP_HISTORY..."

s3cmd ls s3://your-s3-path/ | while read -r line;  
do
   createDate=`echo $line|awk {'print $1" "$2'}`
   createDate=`date -d"$createDate" +%s`
   olderThan=`date -d"-$BACKUP_HISTORY" +%s`

   if [[ $createDate -lt $olderThan ]]
   then
      fileName=`echo $line|awk {'print $4'}`

      if [[ $fileName != "" ]]
      then
         s3cmd del "$fileName"
      fi
   fi
done

echo "... done."

robert

Or rsync to another host:

#!/bin/sh

#[Note: This is a FULL system backup script and requires root. If you
# only want to backup your user files then tailor the script.]
# Use "sudo crontab -e" to set up a cron job to run it.
#
#[Note: --delete will remove target files and dirs that no longer exist in
# the source, you may or may not want this sync'ing.]
#
#[Note: The first backup will take a while, to add the files to the
# target, after that it should only take a matter of minutes.]
#
#[Note: rsync must be installed on the source and the target.]
#

BINPRE="rsync -r -t -p -o -g -v -l -D --delete"
SSH="-e ssh -p 22"
BINPOST="<target_user>@<target_host_ip>:/<target_backup_dir>"
EXCLUDES="--exclude=/mnt --exclude=/tmp --exclude=/proc --exclude=/dev "
EXCLUDES=$EXCLUDES"--exclude=/sys --exclude=/var/run --exclude=/srv "
EXCLUDES=$EXCLUDES"--exclude=/media "

date >> /root/start

$BINPRE "$SSH" / $EXCLUDES $BINPOST

date >> /root/stop

The problem with rsyncing to another host is that you only have one copy. If something gets corrupted, hacked, or whatever today, and the backup/rsync script runs tonight, you've lost any chance to recover things. With my script (or any other 'real' backup system), you have 365 (or however many you choose) days of backups to choose from.

robert

I provided a basic script so anyone can figure it out and get it running. I run my script on the client (Linode here) nightly.

On my target server I run a weekly cron too, a weekly location on the target, from daily target to weekly target locations on the target, I do monthly too. It's not perfect, yours is better in that you can choose any day of the year so long as you're willing to pay for S3 storage.

Mine works with any target system, any Linux, Mac or even Windows (there are ssh and rsync solutions on Windows) where you can run:

1) ssh
2) rsync

That's all you need. The target is where you can break out weekly, monthly, bi-daily, whatever periods you want, with cron, as long as your target has the disk space available.

edit: rsync saves immensely on disk wear and tear too.

If you want to save multiple versions, I suggest using rsync for the current updated backups, and then run rsnapshot {daily, weekly, monthly, etc.} for the multiple versions (using hard links -- very fast and saves space).

Lester

_________________
http://www.ingber.com

Thanks for pointer to opsmate.com - I'm going to check them out.

Thank you for mentioning this. I've been using Crashplan on my home computers for a while now, I don't know why I never thought to use it on my server. But it's done now