Backup options

I

Ichiban

Member
I was pretty excited today to note that Backupsy had launched an R1Soft based product line which offered 100gb of storage, unmetered bandwidth and one R1Soft license for $4/month. Seemed like a no-brainer solutions to the problem of offsite backups for my KH VPS-2.

Unfortunately, the R1Soft client software won't work within an OpenVZ container.

I know Knownhost takes full VPS backups every other day and keeps a number of those around, but I'd still like the comfort of having my own offsite backups as well. Are there any solutions, similar to the Backupsy product, which anyone can recommend for offsite backups?
 
Ichiban said:
I was pretty excited today to note that Backupsy had launched an R1Soft based product line which offered 100gb of storage, unmetered bandwidth and one R1Soft license for $4/month. Seemed like a no-brainer solutions to the problem of offsite backups for my KH VPS-2.

Unfortunately, the R1Soft client software won't work within an OpenVZ container.

I know Knownhost takes full VPS backups every other day and keeps a number of those around, but I'd still like the comfort of having my own offsite backups as well. Are there any solutions, similar to the Backupsy product, which anyone can recommend for offsite backups?
Click to expand...

Have you had a look at cPanel's backup system which can utilize FTP, rsync, and now even Amazon services? I think this might be the perfect solution for you :)
 
I have been playing with my own solution which encrypts the cPanel backups and then copies them to a FlipHost storage VPS. What made me look at the new Backupsy option was the price. I pay $3.50/month for a 100gb storage VPS with FlipHost. Getting R1Soft and 100gb for just $0.50 more seemed like a steal.

I'll stay with my custom FlipHost solution for now, but the cPanel/Amazon solution might be the ticket. Thanks for the advice, everyone.
 
I'm using the Amazon S3 backup that's built into WHM and it's working flawlessly. Very impressed with it and very inexpensive if you're only pushing data for storage. My combined backups for the month are around 1TB and it costs around $10 / month. If you need to retrieve data there are additional fees. Hopefully you'll also have local backups and wouldn't need to pull anything from Amazon unless it was in a worst case scenario.
 
I have also begun using the cPanel S3 destination option for backups, however it doesn't have the control I would like - namely to push files to less expensive Reduced Redundancy Storage and invoke server-side encryption at Amazon as the file is received.

For that matter, the tool I use to backup Wordpress sites and give site owners easy access to WP backups has the same limitations.

Has anyone used S3cmd <http://s3tools.org/s3cmd> to manage uploads to S3?

I would like to have this installed on my VPS-2. Its operation seems easy enough, and it provides access to nearly all of the S3 API functions.
 
Terry,

I worked with s3cmd a few years ago and it wasn't terrible. If I recall correctly I put it on a cron job for someone or something. Seems like I remember there being an oddity in setting it up and getting it working but once past that it wasn't so bad.

That's the only experience I have with it.
 
I used s3cmd before cPanel baked S3 backups into WHM. It worked just fine. The sync --recurssive option is what I used. I had WHM limit the local backups and then used S3 bucket policy to automate deletion or moving to Glacier. The only issue is that I don't believe you can use the sync command and specify reduced redundancy. Encryption you can do however.
 
You might be right about the sync function. I won't be using that at the outset, just the upload of local backup files. But with the bucket policies it's not too big a deal to move them off to cheaper storage after a few weeks anyway.

Did you find it pretty easy to setup and configure?

Thanks.
 
I'm looking at backup options and I'd appreciate opinions. I'm a web developer and I have also been offering web hosting (mostly to my own clients) for the past 3 years or so on a Hostgator reseller (shared hosting) account. I recently moved all of that to a VPS here at KH and have been very happy with the results so far.

at HG I was backing up with a custom script that would Zip each cPanel account in turn and then FTP it to my 'unlimited' web hosting plan at bluehost, which I still have and I am still using this as my backup strategy. I also host a few personal websites and most of my email at bluehost. However the bluehost account is a bit slow and expensive for what it is. So I was looking at other options - conisdering one of the following:

1. get a 'unlimted' shared hosting account with another provider, move all the bluehost stuff and continue as I am (keeping personal sites and email on the new solution)

2. As above but with a DigitalOcean plan. Would mean more hassle to setup, keep secure etc and storage space is a bit tight, although I'm only using about 25GB in total currently.

3. Update my standard dropbox account to a pro account for around £7/month. This would give me 1TB of storage which would be plenty for quite some time, but I'd have to move all my personal sites and email to the KH vps, which is OK but I like having that separate for email redundancy should something go wrong at KH for some reason.

4. I'm sure there are other solutions I'm not aware of that may be better (some mentioned above)?
 
Read the fine print on the 'unlimited' shared hosting accounts. The unlimited provider I was with specifically prohibited backup storage. I got spanked when they noticed a couple gigs from my PC backed up there.
 
Disclaimer: I'm no expert and these are just opinions based on my experience.

I had an "unlimited" Bluehost account for 7-8 years - until this past fall. Their TOS specifically prohibited using it for backup. I didn't and so never had any issues, so can't say how often or aggressively they prosecute this. But if you're backing up for reliability and emergencies it seems unwise to use a service that prohibits it.

I also had a reseller account at HostGator since 2007. Just closed it this past week. I'm not sure but I think their TOS was similar. All these providers (in pretty much every industry - cell phones, car rental, web hosting, all-you-can-eat buffets) put some kind of limits on their "unlimited" plans so, personally, I would be making sure I wasn't increasing my risk by willfully violating TOS with my backup strategy.

You could keep 25GB on Amazon S3 for pennies per month. I've kept backups there for the past 2-3 years for a dozen websites (100GB-200GB total) and never had a bill larger than $2/mo. Or use DropBox Pro. Or OneDrive, or any of the dozens of other cloud-based storage options. Cloud storage is now the cheapest thing you can buy and UIs are getting better.

Your intermingling of website backups and email redundancy is confusing to me. Seems like two things better addressed separately - and neither of them necessarily by getting another hosting account unless you're going to do the whole mirroring/failover thing.
 
yes I'm well aware of the limits of 'unlimted' hosting and that bluehost prohibits backup. I've been doing it for a few years now but that's one of the reasons I'm looking at other solutions, it just doesn't feel safe. As for the email redundancy, I don't mean failsafe email for each domain I have, but rather having a separate email on a separate domain that's not hosted on the same server I have my clients on, in case that server is down for whatever reason. As I don't use gmail or similar (and don't intend to) a separate hosting account is how I get around this.

I'm definitely leaning towards using Dropbox pro (or perhaps S3) for the backups and just get a cheap hosting for my personal websites and email. Should still come in at less than what I currently pay for bluehost at around £165/year.
 
Thanks for your thoughts guys, I didn't mean to sound curt before, hope I didn't come across that way.

I've set up an amazon S3 bucket, have just been on WHM checking the backup settings - I see it can be configured to backup to AS3, which I've set up. Looking in the crons for WHM, is it the 'backup' cronjob, or the 'cpbackup' cronjob for this?
 
Nevermind, I did some testing and got it working with the 'backup' cronjob.

One more question: in the "Backup Configuration" section of WHM I have setup weekly backups, retain 2 weekly backups, and I have UNCHECKED "Retain backups in the default backup directory." ("If this option is not selected, backups will be deleted after being moved to another destination."). I have setup the amazon S3 bucket as the "additional destination" and that is working. My question is, will this script on WHM automatically delete older backups on the amazon S3 bucket for me (as per the settings on the WHM page), or will I have to manage that from within AWS?
 
Somewhere (maybe in another thread here) I was told that WHM has no mechanism for deleting files from S3. I would have to go back and look at my settings - I don't think they are quite the same as yours - but no files have ever been deleted from my S3 acccount.
 
On the issue of a separate, emergency email I understand your point now. It seems like an inexpensive hosting account for a domain somewhere else is a reasonable approach. I know there are also registrars that offer email accounts. I'm not sure how this works as I haven't used it, but hover.com (one registrar I use) offers various configurations of email for $5 to $29 per year. The more expensive accounts come with storage, webmail, forwarders, spam protection, etc.
 
One thing that concerns me though is that in the future, those two providers will point fingers for sure if there's an issue. Just a thought though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top