Proper Backup Strategy

[joltedpixel]

I am on a dedicated server but have a number of clients on a regular type of shared account. Until recently I was impressed with host gator stating it does backups on shared accounts. But I soon found out they only keep the last sunday worth of backups.

I have taken courses and setup backup strategies and this is just useless.

Here is an example:
A piece of software we had was setup to run a cron job based on certain information. That info was sent to the software incorrectly and the cron job ran. This all happened on a Friday night. Monday roles around and we relize what happened. So we contacted hostgator to find out they backed up the corrupted data.

We have no way of going back two sundays because they only save one backup. Many organizations do nightly backups as well as monthly and yearly.

This is not the case with hostgator.

I may be moving my dedicated server and all of my clients do to this fact. And btw I run my own backups for the dedicated server but never ran any for the shared because hostgator said they did them.

[site4mas]

I too am concerned about backups - some of my customers have large sites that are really important to their businesses. What I am considering is buying a hosting package elsewhere, a big one that gives me a huge space, then having a cron job that automatically sends backups by ftp to that other space.

I'm currently at the research phase so I would welcome feedback on this as a strategy and also on the feasibility.

Any suggestions welcome

[joltedpixel]

Hey Site4mas,

I am in the same boat you are in. Last night I spent around 5 hours re-adding data to the database. We had bad software go through and drop about have our data.

I wasn't to worried at first until I found out hostgator does backups only on Sudnays and this happened on a Friday without us knowing until Monday.


I phoned hostgator and the reasoning I got was this "We host over close to half million domains it would be to expensive to backup more than once a week."


We have most of our clients on our dedicated server (with hostgator). The one that we had problems with last night had setup his own reseller account. This is how we are doing backups on our dedicated server:

We built a computer here at our office that on every second night connects to our dedicated server and makes a zip file of everything than downloads it. This computer stores around 7 backups so roughly 2 weeks worth. Our average backup is about 10gb at the moment. It seems to be working great and we have had to go to it once so far to retrieve db info.

Anyways my unix/linux wasn't good enough at the time so I paid someone to come in and set that up. It cost me $200. (not including the computer).

Let me know if you have any ideas or questions.

- Jordan