Are Cron jobs the easy way to set up regular backups?

[mr_nabo]

Hi,

Until recently, I've been manually exporting databases and zipping up root folders for clients every so often in an attempt to backup their site in case of an emergency, but is there an easier, automatic way of doing this?

I only really create static sites and use PHP-MySQL Open source CMSs, so it would really just be an export of the database and all site files (including hidden ones like .htaccess etc.)

How do you backup client websites when there are more than 20 or so? I assume you don't do it manually?

Thanks

[walrus]

I think i've seen mods like that on OSC contributions. If you dont get help here you might find a module that does that sort of thing at the commmunity forums for the CMS your using. If you've already tried that, ther may be a reason that there isnt one available.

[maximillianos]

We use an off-site server backup service offered by our hosting company. We originally used cron jobs to gzip up our databases and files and then sftp them to another server we owned, but it got to be too much trouble.

So we now pay like $10/month for a service our host provides.

[JS_Harris]

a caveat, a cron job uses system resources too, use it sparingly. I have a cron job set up for this purpose but I keep it inactive. I don't activate it unless I know I'll be away from the computer for a few days and even then one backup a day at a time when my visitors tend to be asleep is enough.

[jecasc]

My hoster does an automatic backup every night of all the files and databases. However this backup is only stored for three days. So in addition I use "mysqldumper" to convert all the databases to gzip files every night by cronjob. Since mysqldumper offers email notification I can check in my Emails every day if the backups have been successful.

I also have Cobian Backup running on my local network server in the office which is scheduled to download the gzip files by FTP download an hour after the cronjob and all my html and php files once a week for a complete backup of all my files.

I also use Amazon S3 as storage for an incremental backup of my local server files, so all in all I have three backups:

- the hosters backup
- a backup on my local server
- a backup of the files on my local server on Amazon S3

This all goes automatically. However until now I never had to restore any files so I am not quite sure how smoothly that will go.