Backing up a site with over 300gb of files

[thefish]

I'm looking for a better way to backup our server files.

We have a 250gb disk of the system itself (with Cpanel)
and another 1000gb disk with customer's files.

Till now we used to back up all the customer's files on Amason S3, using a daily cron job. (to transfer only the files we added that day)

My problem is that the transfer rate to Amazone is extreamly low. For example: a 350mb file takes about 15 minutes. So Imagin what it would be to transfer back 300GB.. my calculation came up with a little bit more than 9 days.

Anyone has a better way to back up huge sites like mine?

(I also want to protect myself in the event of fire, so backing up to another drive is not useful...)

[richardg_ca]

I've seen much better speeds than this - the problem is most likely with the upload speed available on your server (it's not a home connection is it?) or the connection between your server and Amazon.

In the first case you'll need to do something physically to get the backups off the server in any reasonable amount of time. If it's just your connection with Amazon you can try other service like Rackspace's Cloud Files or just copying to a backup server with another host.

[tangor]

In addition to the above I use external USB drives of appropriate size... belt and suspenders approach. Two external drives, alternating every 24/48 hours, which are not kept on premises. My content is <1.2tb so full mirror writes are done, but this method could also be used with five drives incrementally for larger sites until you get to the Really Big Stuff. Push the pencil to see what works best. Just make sure you have a method that secures the data off-line and off-site.