These days I see more and more hosting companies offering automated backup solutions. I want this thread to be a reliable source of information on what it takes to backup an entire server full of clients whether it is 3 to 1000 let us know what steps you take for backing up your servers!

We have set it up every day it backs up the whole hard-drive on all our servers. Just did it in WHM

Yes we back up Daily, Weekly, and Monthly via Second Hard Drive. Clients feel safer that way, but I always tell them "Backup yourself" that will make it even safer

Frank

Yes, we do the same, you put it in better words

And a FTP Backup per month is a good idea too.

We do Nightly backups to local secondary drives as well as weekly offsite to other datacenters.

Keep in mind you can backup more then just user data to help with the restore in the event of a drive failure.

I have heard too many stories (1 is enough for me) about NOC Techs formatting the wrong drive during a reinstall to not have the data in another location besides the local box.

How would you go about backing up the entire server besides dual hard drives? I have heard some say to use Raid 1 but what if you would just like to download an entire hd image a month. Is there anything for this?

i have 8 servers going , all do its own backups daily. but when i get to 10th web servers i'll make one ded. server just for backups from all 10 web servers

Hi,

We have a dedicated server with a few clients and our online store. Is there a good solution for backups if you don't have a secondary drive? Is there a company that is reasonably cheap that offers this type of service?

Thanks

Rick

Currently i'm just backing up my database on a day to day basis, although I have thought about using ftp to back it up automatically to a remote server to save me the time and hassle.

Our secondary drive is our backuping drive for all our datas on the primary drive. It's always safe to backup something, because sometimes you might not be able to retrieve, then backups comes to play.

What happens when you require more space for backup? Are you utilizing hot swappable drives at all?

Hi,
As standard we either offer clients boxes with either nightly backups to the slave drive or boxes running RAID1 but as an additional service we offer a 7 day rolling backup and a bi-monthly backup to different servers in a different geographical location

We then back the backups up in 2 different locations.

We use FTP backup, if i may suggest a good provider in that area, it would be Gnax, they have excellent solutions in that matter.

We have found that generally by the time someone discovers they need to restore from backup, the daily backup has already been overwritten.

For this reason we run a daily incremental backup that keeps snapshots for a week. Rsnapshot is an excellent tool for doing this. It uses rsync to copy the files into a directory, and detects whether a file has changed or not. If the file has changed, it saves a copy, if it hasn't changed it just makes a hard link to the previous day's backup. This way you don't take up any more backup space than you need to.

Large IDE drives are so cheap now that there is no excuse for not keeping good backups.

Regards,
Erek

P.S. I wouldn't trust the WHM backup script to back absolutely everything up. pkgacct tends to leave things out like counter data and mailing lists.