Dont get caught out
We as mere mortals need to have this in place because we are fundamentally flawed to fuck up once in a while.
For a proper backup plan to make sense you need to have a strategy implemented not only so a restore is smooth but also to minimize some junk and keep the backup slim to save on space
The strategy
- if you have uploaded files to a folder back it up
- if you have spent time on editing configs back it up
- if you have files you have downloaded and you can't remember where you got them from back it up
Follow this plan and you will have all the stuffs you need to restore in the event of an emergency. If you have really fubared the OS its best to reinstall and then restore the data
The Tools
- Rackspace cloud backup http://www.rackspace.co.uk/cloud/backup
- This obviously only works if you have a Rackspace cloud server
- CDP.me http://cdp.me
- This is a wonderful tool with a slick interface for backing up filesystems/mysql/openvz containers and cpanel (lolwat) configs.
- Holland Backup Manager http://hollandbackup.org/
- A tool for backing up MySQL very useful check out Lukes tutorial on implementing this at http://lukeslinuxlessons.co.uk/holland-backup/
- Github https://github.com
- Spent time making a website or web app upload them to a repo on github this will make it easyer to restore with a simple git clone
There are many other backup solutions out there but these are the ones I frequently use.
I run CDP on a rackspace cloud server with block storage attached this runs backups of my most important locations every night at 3am
it sends me a nice backup report after its finished and was a breeze to setup.
I have holland running weekly at 4am to dump my databases which CDP then picks up.
I could introduce more redundancy by implementing cloud backup on my backup server, this would then backup the backup to cloud files which is impervious to everything
If you don't backup. You're gonna have a bad time
Stay safe and backup