Backup Advice for site content

[pstar]

I need some reco's on how to go about storing and handle backups for my site. Few different situations need to be addressed:

I'm running scheduled jobs (daily/weekly/monthly) Basically, when the clock strikes, my three files auto compile and then attach themselves to an email that gets sent to me and then I transfer these files locally. I don't want to lease a remote server because they are just too expensive for my purpose so I'm looking for alternatives to store info. So rather than have the email sent to me that contains the back ups they will be sent to something that I can buy. I was thinking something like an external drive but I'm looking to not have to manually transfer the files each day from my server. Is there a small back up server I can buy that isn't too expensive or can I configure an external drive to do this. anyone will advice please send it.

[hutuworm]

You may want to buy an external USB HDD?

[MattyMoose]

What I've also done in the past is use a CD Burner with a CDRW disc. It's good for up to a thousand writes (supposedly), but I just format and re-write the disc every night to do my backups.

I replace the disc after about 200 writes (a 1/2 year with backing up every night). It's good if your data isn't that large, but if it's over 700MB, you could go up to a DVD-RW, and do that as well, although I'm not sure about the number of write times you can have on a single DVD-RW disc.

It's a lot cheaper than a tape drive, and much more transportable, in terms of grabbing the CD, and copying files from it on another box.

[VectorJ]

I use rsync to copy files from the server to a local drive that's dedicated to backups. I usually create a new directory with the unixtime as the name, that way I have a full backup at any point the rsync script has run, not just the last backup (which may be corrupt or I've screwed it up, etc).