Do you keep backups of your sites?
 

If so, how do you do it? I'd be curious to know what format and what media you use as well... tar and dvd or a zip on your hard drive or?

I backup all my sites on dvd and also have them on my HD

I download my entire site from my server (which takes a while) and then burn it to dvd. Cd's don't have enough space.

yes I do back up my sites using 2 servers,my pc (.rar format), hard drive, cds...:)

I keep zips on cd's at my wifes computer desk.

I keep tars on different servers than the server the sites on.

I have all my websites on my HD and back it up every now and then. Odd's of my server and HD both dying are pretty slim.

I do backups every week.

I do all my sites on my local development server and that run backups every night. Any online stuff is just copied from my dev server..

All my online db's run backup every hour/day (hour or day, depending on how important the data is) and e-mails the data to an account on my dev server..

i use daily remote backup

Yeah , i am hosting some users so i must backup all.

i back everything up on a weekly basis.

Weekly backups.

I think I will in the future... See result of not doing it in sig..
Stupid fucking Hackers!
If anyone here knows GrEEnHacker make sure he gets a slow and very very painful death while you say hello from me!

I have them all on my HD and some in CDs...

Wow, seems either more people backup then I thought or....

Those who don't back up are neglecting to post :)

Hopefully, this poll raises awareness that backing up your data is important. Look at poor Roger above.

I have them on 3 HD and also on DVD´s

yep weekly

Yup :thumbsup watching my ass...

I don't do it often enough :(

I burn everything onto dvd weekly and keep mirrors of my sites on my hd. Just did a MySql backup last night.

I let my kick ass number one host, Dweeks, handle all that crap.

i backup them weekly with all databases

of course

We burn content to DVDs and back up to second server. Once our primary host had a problem with his datacenter and we were using back up server more than 24 hours. So if you're running a site with big number of visitors and members you'd better have solution on case of host problems.

can't believe nobody mentioned redundant RAID drives? :helpme

Not a backup, granted, but a HD WILL die at some point - why risk putting your backup abilities to the test and all the pain, headaches and downtime until you can restore from backup?

Yes backup is essential, and offsite backup at that (not onto a second HD on the server...what if a tornado hit the DC?), but RAID1 is at the least the minimum in combo with daily offsite backups...


If anyone is interested in $1/GB remote backups to a tier 1 DC, hit me up on icq 283914791

Well, raid can definitely help, depending on the setup. However, it is a pricey alternative and most people on dedicated servers can't afford it. Backing up to your home pc or paying your hosting company $10-25 per month to do it is still cheaper then a proper raid setup.

Warchild - if I was in your shoes, I'd still have a local copy of my sites. I don't care how kickass a host is, shit happens. Airplanes flying into buildings and shit can really fuck up a backup plan :)

Not saying that having your host backup your shit is a bad idea... actually I'd say it's a pretty smart idea. Having a backup of your shit at the datacenter makes recovery a helluva lot faster then uploading from your home connection.

beside the cost of the extra HD (say $10/mo for 80GB) a raid system should definately not cost no more than $10/mo and talking with your host you should easily get away with a $100 one-time fee to have RAID setup :2 cents: (talking about basic RAID1 of course)

I do daily db backups onto another hd, but I should really be using something more permanent like dvds.

Wow. Must be software raid, something I wouldnt trust with my data :)

A decent raid setup, would involve a raid card and an extra drive. If your host sells you this for $10 per month, rest assured this card is garbage.

And raid1 doesnt make me sleep easy at night anyways :)

whenever I make changes I make backups

Since I have physical access to my server, I plug a USB external hard drive to it and back the whole thing up.

well, i am supposed to have weekly in-house backup for my dedicated boxes at webair.

the question is--has anyone using this service had a failure---and if so, how fast did you recover?

i'd be very interested in knowing.

Not at all = $10 for an ATA RAID board and $10 for the extra drive (I never said $10 for all). In fact I pay $10 for the extra drive (these are SATA drive BTW) and I paid a flat $100 fee for installation of the RIAD controller and configuration.

And why the heck wouldn't you sleep well at night with a RAID1 setup? My setup is RAID 1/0 which is as fast as a RAID5 setup. Would have been nicer with SCSI drives, but the server is doing just fine.

Really can't see why RAID1 would worry you.

Ehm, Quality RAID controllers aren't as expensive as you may think - industry leading cards (eg the Broadcom RAIDCore falmily) wholesale for $150-230

If your on Cpanel then it only back ups 2 gigs per domain.

Maybe check on that.

We do weekly backups for all our clients but we recomend the user backs up as well. You never know what might happen.

I back up my sites through ftp onto my hard drive with every change and can have them back up as fast as my DSL can move the files.

Another thing to chew on if we are talking about people with dedicated servers - backing up your data is one thing, but anyone backing up /etc or /usr ? A fried hard drive can be replaced and your data put back on from backup, but what about all those config files? Those custom software installations? All those patches? Are sure the version of gzip that is currently on your server HD is the same as the gzip that was present when the drive was setup? Maybe it got updated during the time you have been on the server? If so, your backups may not unzip properly...


It really is an absolute nightmare recovering from a fried harddrive and will take at least 48h of hard work getting a server back to its original configuration...
even if your server is fully managed, your server admin does not make custom images of your HD to restore the drive to its original state minus your data. It needs to be restored using the OS image then repatching then applying all the apache/php/mysql/etc configs then reinstalling any extra software that was there before you can re-apply your data. It's maybe not you that does it, but it takes time and all the while, your server is not live...

I'm not scaremonguering, just giving a heads-up. I would say that around a third of people think they are safe with their backups, but a backup is only good if it can be restored successfully - have you ever tried restoring your backup to make sure it's good? :Oh crap

visual sourcesafe daily to another local machine i keep and rars that i upload offsite once a week.

I have a raid array on my server and all my data is automatically mirrored to prevent data loss.

We backup all our sites to two(2) remote offsite servers, DVD/CD, and locally.

I backup twice a week. We use RAID 10 and also mirror our storage array to another array. With Terabytes of content it would take alot of DVD's to back that upto :)

What's the easiest way to backup all your information from your server?

pay someone else too do it. your hosting company probably offers a service.

To be honest - all this DVD backup stuff is great, since it gives an archival copy, but it's not very practical. Perhaps once a month etc.

For safe daily incremental backups, there best option is to ackup to a remote server (or to 2nd HD on the same server at the very minimum) using rsync. If backing up remotely, don't forget to backup over SSL.