Here’s my secret: I don’t pay for Backup Software. With fast Internet connections, cheap disks, and Open Source Software, I just don’t see the need.
I’ve been running the web hosting side of this business for 2 years now. This business started as a hobby. Some friends were starting up companies, and needed help. I justified the expense by running IRC on the machine and chatting with friends. Even with this hobby, I focused on data redundancy and backups.
I had heard of and followed Leafy Host, and didn’t want to go down that road, ever. Enter Rsync and OpenSSH.
Every day I run a simple script that copies new files from the web server to the backup server. The backup server itself contains redundant disks, but that’s another story.
rsync -av --progress \
--compress --delete --archive \
--backup --backup-dir=`date +%Y%m%d` \
/data username@hostname.com:/data/consulting/webserverbackup/
There it is. My script is a bit more complex, as it iterates over multiple directories, but this is the one that matters. Not only does this transfer the files every day, but it saves a snapshot of the files removed since the day before in a directory with the date as a name.
It works, it’s resiliant, and it’s free. This technique works great with Linux, Solaris, or even Windows with the Cygwin Environment installed.