Archiving and backing up your websites

What do you use? Where? With Who?

[limbo]

There has been so many recent security flaws, bugs and virii that I am considering increasing security of files, if I was to have a problem.

So, obviously, I have a remote 'live' copy held by my host, and a local copy (on PC harddrive) and from time to time I store the entire copy of my harddrive on CDRW.

Do I realistically need to do any more? what lengths do you go to protect you data from possible catastrophy?

Is there a good archiving program that I could be using? Or perhaps having another server as backup?

or am I just being paranoid?

Ta

Limbo

[vrtlw]

The most common form of securing your backups is to ensure that you have a recent copy off-site, (in our case at our bank). When working with not so critical data I tend to do that once a week and keep a local copy on site that is generated nightly.

In my previous position where I was responsible for approx. 2tb of customers data, I implemented a system that kept a snapshot of the data in another datacenter. This may be extreme for your environment, but it always meant we had a fallback should the worst happen. We then utilized this snapshot to conduct our nightly or weekly backups without affecting the throughput to our production servers.

All in all if you have a regular "read only" copy of your data in a different location than your server then you are doing about the best you can to ensure your disaster recovery procedures are succesful. If however you are talking about large volumes of critical or politically valuable data then you perhaps should look at replicating it.

<added>off-site defined as geographical location</added>

[limbo]

vrtlw

Thanks for the excellent advice

I have not taken it as far as replication but I have asked a friend/associate to back up my files in case of disaster - he lives in another continent so I think that is about I really need do on top of making local and CD archive copies.

Ta

Limbo

[BwanaZulia]

Since I have lost a LOT of data (six months worth of work) twice, I will tell you what I do now.

Machine: Data on RAID 1 array. Monitored
NIGHTLY: Main database is copied (rsync) from RAID to another drive
WEEKLY: All important areas are zipped up and moved to another drive
WEEKLY: RAID is backuped up across network.
MONTHLY: I pull down (off site) latest copy of weekly backup.

BZ