What's A Normal Backup Frequency?

[St Rhenium]

How often do you backup your files? For me it's every week, but I'm made to worry sometimes by people saying you should do it every day. I don't do it every day because it takes me a fair amount of time - at least 30 mins or so.

How often do you do it?

 

[Allegrif]

What are you backing up, and how are you doing it?

 

[St Rhenium]

What are you backing up, and how are you doing it?

About 40GB of digital data from an internal HDD to an external HDD

 

[MapleTree]

I just backed up my phone yesterday and I think it's been a few months since I've backed up the data on my computer. I should really be doing it more often. I typically only back up my data when something starts playing up and I get worried it may crash on me!

 

[Allegrif]

I just backed up my phone yesterday and I think it's been a few months since I've backed up the data on my computer. I should really be doing it more often. I typically only back up my data when something starts playing up and I get worried it may crash on me!

Haha, I'm pretty guilty of a similar sentiment. It's easy to think 'ah, should probably start backing up now' after a particularly bad crash!

About 40GB of digital data from an internal HDD to an external HDD

If this is just one desktop machine, have you considered putting two solid state drives in a RAID 1 configuration? This means that as you work and save things, identical data is written to two drives. If one fails, you have a full backup copy without ever actually running a backup.

 

[Bacton]

If this is just one desktop machine, have you considered putting two solid state drives in a RAID 1 configuration? This means that as you work and save things, identical data is written to two drives. If one fails, you have a full backup copy without ever actually running a backup.

Wow, I'd never heard of that until you mentioned it. Just spent 15 minutes Googling it for further info - I think this might be the way to go for me, thanks so much for the heads up!

 

[MattW]

Wow, I'd never heard of that until you mentioned it. Just spent 15 minutes Googling it for further info - I think this might be the way to go for me, thanks so much for the heads up!

RAID1 will also give a performance improvement, as the reads can happen from either disk in the array.

 

[Ajdglass]

I do incremental backups on my servers every hour, day, week and month. But I never back my phone, PC, iPad or anything else up. I know I should do and I am annoyed when they break but I just consider it as natures way of clearing out all my junk.

 

[MattW]

I do incremental backups on my servers every hour, day, week and month. But I never back my phone, PC, iPad or anything else up. I know I should do and I am annoyed when they break but I just consider it as natures way of clearing out all my junk.

Are you using any 3rd party software to perform the incremental backups? I've just installed Jetback on my cPanel servers to provide access for my clients to their backed up data. I was previously using rsnapshot to take the incremental backups, but I was having to restore manually for them.

 

[Ajdglass]

Hi Matt,

I'm using r1soft now which is backing up to a remote server in Amsterdam. I have some servers with remote databases so I use a script I had made to dump these databases into a directory on the main cPanel server which r1soft then backs up. It does mean I have to import the databases manually if required. Clients have full access to the backups through cPanel and can restore all the files themselves. I rarely get asked for a backup copy of anything these days anyway so this is more a saftey net for me rather than the client.

I did try jetbackup before I moved to r1soft but I couldn't get it to properly work, had loads of errors when trying to restore a remote backup from the client interface and when I asked for support from jetbackup ( they are in Israel I believe ) they didn't manage to fix half the issues I was having so I gave up. I'm no server admin by any means though so I may have simply set it up incorrectly. I'm only having to do the technical role just now after buying my business partner out and it's a coin toss as to weather or not I have the actual ability to continue safely on my own.

 

[MattW]

I did try jetbackup before I moved to r1soft but I couldn't get it to properly work, had loads of errors when trying to restore a remote backup from the client interface and when I asked for support from jetbackup ( they are in Israel I believe ) they didn't manage to fix half the issues I was having so I gave up.

What were you backing up to using Jetbackup? I've got a dedicated server which I use to back up my other servers to, so I'm configured with the SSH backup destination, and it's been working really well. Had several customers use it to restore files and databases.

 

[Ajdglass]

I was using a hetzner backup server in Germany, couldn't get SSH to work so tried using LFTP and that would only partially work. It's probably a perfectly good piece of software just not idiot proof enough for me to get it working properly. I think the fact I use remote MySQL servers was an issue with it too but thats also an issue I have with r1soft. The work around I'm using for the databases seems to be working fine though so fingers crossed all will be well.

 

[MattW]

I was using a hetzner backup server in Germany, couldn't get SSH to work so tried using LFTP and that would only partially work. It's probably a perfectly good piece of software just not idiot proof enough for me to get it working properly. I think the fact I use remote MySQL servers was an issue with it too but thats also an issue I have with r1soft. The work around I'm using for the databases seems to be working fine though so fingers crossed all will be well.

If their backup is anything like the one OVH provides, then it's FTP access only (and limited to access from the actual server it's backing up). I found with these types of backup, the servers are very slow, and time out causing more issues. That's why I purchased a £30 / per month dedicated server with 2 x 2TB drives in RAID1 to use for backup purposes.

 

[MattW]

I think the fact I use remote MySQL servers was an issue with it too but thats also an issue I have with r1soft

You might need to allow remote MySQL access from the server running r1soft as well, rather than relying on the main server trying to generate the MySQL backup?

 

[Ajdglass]

Hi Matt,

The r1soft backups I have running just now do seem slow as hell but they are running incrementally and are working and that's a good place for me at the moment. I do have a local SAN server on the same rack with 14TB of storage available but I've no idea how to access it. :/.

Speaking with Citrix at the moment with regards to some Xenserver help too! Outsourcing everything, sigh.

White flag may be getting raised soon !

 

[MattW]

That sounds like a bit of a nightmare. What OS is the SAN running?

 

[Ajdglass]

I have no idea.

I can see it running in XenCenter as an NFS Storage. The VMs are using centos so I would assume if the SAN was using an OS it would be the same.