Forum Moderators: phranque
I'd hope you mean "FTP" as a generic term, and the companies offer a secure protocol, such as sftp or https.
You can set-up the same sort of off-site backup yourself. While you lose some of the advantages of having your backups done "professionally", you also avoid many of the pitfalls.
You don't have to worry about what happens if the company goes out of business. You don't have to worry about whether they really are encrypting the data as they say (if they do). And you don't have to be concerned about whether they maintain off-site backup. You control everything.
The other thing to consider - if your site doesn't rely on user contributions and doesn't use a CMS - is whether you actually need backup in the first place.
If your site is static, you should already HAVE a backup of everything that is on your site (content and any software). You should have not only back-up, but revision control. You should have your configuration files, as well, under revision control.
And if you have user contributions, backing that up may only require backing-up a single database.
The thread would be of no benefit if we are unable to know which services are best and which are worst. Wish the mods would allow this one to go through if members play fair, there are precedents for this.
But thanks jtara, I somehow forgot I can setup my own too, although I suspect it would be far too expensive than an outsourced service to book a stand alone box for this job, and shared hosting would be out of the question for security, a cheaper VPS perhaps?
I suspect it would be far too expensive than an outsourced service to book a stand alone box for this job, and shared hosting would be out of the question for security, a cheaper VPS perhaps?
If you have a broadband connection, your personal PC would likely be just fine for the job.
Most consumer broadband connections have asymmetrical bandwidth - much larger for downloads than uploads. Fortunately, unless/until you need to do a restore, the larger bandwidth is in the right direction.
If you have a broadband connection, your personal PC would likely be just fine for the job.
Doing that right now as i type this, my VPS just went down on Saturday evening. My databse backup was for saturday morning and I also lost a few files because that wasn't very recent.
I can schedule downloads with my FTP software to sync the server with a folder on my PC. Fortunately it has a "only newer or modified" option so I'm not downloading every file. As of now I'm scheduling it for every hour but I'm going to see how well it works, haven't gotten to the point of a scheduled download yet.
After that I only need to figure out how to handle the database backup so I'm not downloading a 50MB file every hour for only a few additions.
After that I only need to figure out how to handle the database backup so I'm not downloading a 50MB file every hour for only a few additions.
Replicate the database onto a local server running on your PC. Most database servers have a replication option.
[dev.mysql.com...]
I'd suggest using a secure tunnel. Don't expose either database server on the Internet!
