Forum Moderators: phranque
The only thing is that it is cheaper to use the DC backup because I don't need the whole server - only about a tenth of it. It is only a saving if more people use the server.
So - I got to wondering whether there are people who club together to get low-end servers to use for backup - and if so - where would one find such a group? Are they advertised? Set up amongst friends?
buying another cheap low-spec server and sticking it all there.
A good option - I do that myself. As well as having backup #2 hosted in my attic on a spare PC setup as a basic FTP server.
people who club together to get low-end servers to use for backup
Not a great deal different to getting a cheap VPS at a different datacentre (spreading risk amongst DC's is a good idea in my view).
How much data are we talking about? Is this < 10gb or are we in tape drive terriatory?
If the data is primarily DB based, you can also setup most DB's to act as a master/slave pair. I'm in the middle of setting up one of those at the moment. Most modern DB's (the one I'm working on is MySQL 5) are extremely good at doing this, and it means you don't need to do a DB dump at intervals - backups are effectively done on the fly immediately.
TJ
cheap VPS
How much data are we talking about? Is this < 10gb or are we in tape drive terriatory?
(the one I'm working on is MySQL 5)
I will have to look around - most of the VPS provision is rather limited in disk space.
Hence my question about data size. I've got a 10gb disk VPS that was bought as a spare box at a cost of about £12/month (can't remember exactly what we pay, but something like that). If your storage requirement is less than 10gig, that would work fine. Would something like that be within budget? There are a lot of VPS's around with 10gig space in that sort of price bracket.
being mostly scripted and database driven
MySQL 5 will support master/slave database configs. So you could setup a cheap VPS as a MySQL slave and have the two keep in sync. It's a little tricky to setup, but it's instant backup and extremely efficient.
<Added>
Actually, you can do this with MySQL 4 if that's what you're thinking of upgrading to, but it's method is not as good. MySQL 5 supports proper queuing and multi-threading in the syncronisation part. Essentially that means that your TCP/IP connection can drop out for a bit and it won't matter - transactions just queue on the master and the slave will catch back up when it's available again.
I wouldn't recommend you do this with MySQL 4 - if either slave/master goes offline for a bit, it can cause real problems with sync.
Might be an idea to have a thread about this in the DB forum if you're interested? I haven't got time to write it up next couple of days, but literally having just set this up I could probably write a half-decent how-to.
TJ
