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..

[Jafo232]

Originally Posted by amcd

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.

I do something similar, except I do a backup of a slave so as to keep the dump from blocking..

[SEOvB]

Originally Posted by Jafo232

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?

You may want to shop around to see what other people are charging. I used Bqinternet (http://www.bqinternet.com/backup/) for my backup services when i required them, and it was A+ for a low price.

[Hornstar]

Originally Posted by FRDS

You may want to shop around to see what other people are charging. I used Bqinternet (http://www.bqinternet.com/backup/) for my backup services when i required them, and it was A+ for a low price.

Thanks for that link, that looks like quite a good service.

[Jafo232]

It doesn't look bad, although I only see daily backups. Doesn't appear to cover hourly, weekly or monthly.. Could just be me.. In fact, it only appears to have one backup.. The daily one..

The samba share feature is a good idea (provided it is read only).. However, I could see people abusing the "No data transfer limit" feature in combination with the share. You could basically use the share to serve large files (i.e. videos).

[TECK]

Why pay money when you can do it yourself, like the pro's?
Just use rsync, it is the only method that will not break your busy servers while doing a backup.
What do you think they use when they do your backup? Heh...

Edit: Check what bqinternet.com uses as procedure.
Features:
Daily backup using rsync technology
SSH encryption
On-the-fly compression
Get back online instantly with a Samba mount
FTP access
No data transfer limit
No setup fee

[Jafo232]

If you peruse the mods forum, you can see how technically apt your average Vbulletin owner is. Asking them to handle rsync would be an interesting follow..

[Lynne]

Originally Posted by Jafo232

If you peruse the mods forum, you can see how technically apt your average Vbulletin owner is. Asking them to handle rsync would be an interesting follow..

[TECK]

If the average vBulletin owner is not capable to perform a rsync process, then the above listed service will come handy to them.
However, you have to look at rsync process like you would copy files from a folder to another... really easy. Setting up your own local rsync mirror is just a matter of configuring the rsyncd daemon to make your portage directory available for syncing. That's all.

[Jafo232]

Backing up however needs to be more than just mirroring the site. Lets say, for whatever reason, config.php is wiped out, or corrupted. The mirror server will just copy it, or delete it I suppose. Or a file gets hacked, it will get copied to the mirror.

By using incremental backups with hard linking, you can keep snapshots on the backup server to allow for rollbacks to certain times (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly)..

I guess what I am saying, is rsync alone is not all that helpful.

[amcd]

Originally Posted by Jafo232

If you peruse the mods forum, you can see how technically apt your average Vbulletin owner is. Asking them to handle rsync would be an interesting follow..

this thread is in the big boards forum.