Big Boarders & Backups..
 

My last few projects have been with boards that fit the big board description. Hundreds of thousands of members, millions of posts, and tons of activity.

Usually I am hired on to help with fixing issues with plugins, writing custom plugins, optimizing, etc.. My last three clients, in addition to other things, all wanted consultation on backing up data. For the most part, they all had in common one feeling and that was that they had little to no faith in their dedicated hosting provider when it came to the backups. Either they did not understand it, or were somehow discouraged when they tried to use it last.

My last/current client actually bought me a drive and begged me to backup his data for him (for a fee of course).. Well, I have always had my own system for backing up my servers which allows me to have incremental backups so you could have hourly/weekly/monthly/yearly backups. Using rsync and hard links, I have multiple backups without using a ton of storage. Basically if something happened to my data, I could get back the last hours version of it. So I set him up with the same thing and he was ecstatic.. Gave him FTP access to the server where I stored his backups (using the drive he bought :) ) and he could see, and download all of his files at any interval..

Got me thinking about the demand for such a thing. Is this common with big boarders here? What would happen to you tomorrow if your servers hard drive(s) suffered some ill fate (power surge, water damage, dead drive, etc..)? Are you confident in your backup strategy?

The reason why I ask is, if there is a demand out there for it, I might consider running a small service to do it, but before I even bother, I thought of asking here first..

I'd be interested in such a service, but depending on how much it would cost would be a factor, because my dedicated server is costing me enough already.

I doubt many want a backup service that is not located at the same physical place or at least have a direct highspeed network connection to such a location.

I would not have to push my backups over the regular internet conneections.

Funny, I always thought the idea of having a remote backup a selling point. If say that same physical place caught on fire and burned down what good would having a backup system be there?

My backups transmit over the regular Internet yes, via SSH..

I haven't even considered a price..

Obviously, the big issue with big-boards is regular backups to the mysql db. For me, mysqlhotcopy took too long to use frequently. I ended up having to go with binary logs and weekly mysqlhotcopies.

arn

A physical remote location is good in case of fire etc., but you should ensure that there is a fast direct connection between the 2 locations.

Ive noticed its become common for a hosting company to have a backup on remote these days.

Exactly. Virtually every hosting company now offers off-site backup solutions for those who want them. At the very least, a host will provide an off-machine backup or NAS access to do a more secure and cluster/machine independent backup. There are however companies that offer these services and do well at it... but to enter the marketplace, you'd be competing against established players and need to do a lot to insure your system's reliability and security. The last thing a site needs is to be outsourcing their backup solution to someone running a "small service" that ends up crashing.

I can understand that.. Many of the dedicated solutions I have seen include some sort of backup service.. Mine would be compliment that backup and offer some level of redundancy..

Thinking of prices, I was contemplating about $100/mo to backup 25gb of data... Opinions?

I do a full mysqldump of the db once a day at the least busy hour and the .tgz is rsynced to another server 3000 kilometers away.