Do you download your website's backups or store them on your host/server?

Discussion in 'Security and Legal' started by Kaiser, May 28, 2011.

  1. Kaiser

    Kaiser Regular Member

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    I see alot of people making backups, but not downloading then and just leaving it on their host/servers.. well then whats the point? Say your host goes down or suddenly closes than all your backups are gone and than what was the point right?

    Or someone somehow gets access to your hosting account and they end up deleting everything such as your files, backups and other things then what can you do?

    Thats why I don't just leave backups on my host but download and store them on my pc.
     
  2. SpacewardAsh

    SpacewardAsh Lurking From Space

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    You try downloading 30+GB worth of data from your server to your PC, it takes forever via command line...

    For cPanel sites, whenever I generate a full cPanel backup, I leave one in the home directory, and download a copy to my PC just encase something happens
     
  3. Kaiser

    Kaiser Regular Member

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    I can see a problem with downloading a whole bakuup of an entire host which you are referring to in your first sentence as you run one but my question is about your website/forum.

    And yea I always leave one both in the home directory and download it on my pc as well just to be on the safe side as anything could go wrong with both.
     
  4. lucasbytegenius

    lucasbytegenius Regular Member

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    Well I do download and store them on another server, however I'd like a more automatic way of doing this.
    I've got a php script that's supposed to run the full backup system and then upload the file to that server and then the server will move it to another directory that nobody has FTP access to, but I've been having trouble getting the backup script to work.
     
  5. Kaiser

    Kaiser Regular Member

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    Well you really haven't answered the question though.. do you download and store them on your pc?
     
  6. lucasbytegenius

    lucasbytegenius Regular Member

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    Sorry :oops:
    Yes I do, sometimes. I just need to either remove some things from the server or get a larger hard drive, because it's 300 MB to download :(
     
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  7. Kaiser

    Kaiser Regular Member

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    AdminBB's backups around 50 MB, but its get bigger each time while it grows.
     
  8. Soulwatcher

    Soulwatcher Regular Member

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    My website is small so I download them to my PC. I think even if I had a website that was 30GB in size I would download it once a month. Because if a hacker hacks your website all they have to do is delete your backup and your screwed!
     
  9. Kaiser

    Kaiser Regular Member

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    Very true, thats why I always download my backups.
     
  10. euantor

    euantor Regular Member

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    I tend to store one outside of the public directory and store another on an external server somewhere. Then I have two copies stored safely. I tend to use cron jobs too, so everything is automatic.
     
  11. Seahunter

    Seahunter Regular Member

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    Leave most of the backups on the hosting server but I download 1 backup once a week. I think that's a decent backup strategy to protect your data. If you're using one of the big hosters it's highly unlikely all your data is going to get hosed (but still possible)
     
  12. AWS

    AWS Administrator

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    All the backups go my local backup server. I keep the newest backup on the server to keep from having to upload one in case of a crash.

    I learned my lesson the hard way about keeping all backups on the main server. I'm so anal about it now that as soon as a new backup hits the server I have it copied from there to the NAS connected to the network router and to my main desktop. Losing a couple million posts will do that to you.
     
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  13. Dan Hutter

    Dan Hutter aka Big Dan

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    I don't bothering pulling down backups anymore as my uploading one would take at least 24 hours. I'd be better off FedExing a thumb drive to the NOC.

    I pay my VPS host for off server backup space. WHM backups up to it daily.
     
  14. benjaminp

    benjaminp Regular Member

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    All your backups are still in one location though? Unless your host's "off server" backup is also offsite.
     
  15. Dan Hutter

    Dan Hutter aka Big Dan

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    Good point never thought of it that way.
     
  16. benjaminp

    benjaminp Regular Member

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    Might be worth looking in to some offsite backup. You can either buy backup space fairly cheap or even grab a vps from LEB depending on your requirements and set it up yourself. Then you wouldn't have to worry about your upload speed being slow.

    While it's unlikely anything would happen to take down the whole datacenter and they're well protected against things like fire. It can't harm to have every eventuality covered :)
     
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  17. AWS

    AWS Administrator

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    24 hours? You must have a slow connection.
     
  18. Iconic

    Iconic The Original

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    I make a full backup and then download it, its only 100mb for the whole site which isn't bad. I tend to download my database a bit more through phpmyadmin.
     
  19. Dan Hutter

    Dan Hutter aka Big Dan

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    Upload is ridiculously slow. Download is just fine.
     
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  20. Coastercraze

    Coastercraze Regular Member

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    I download mine at least twice a month. I also have r1soft backups to an offsite server as well just in case something were to happen.
     

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