Backups: How often do you do them?

My host does daily incremental backups to a seperate server. I also do my own backups, daily for the database & weekly for the file system.

My host takes care of daily backups for me. I pull down my own cPanel backups about once a week or so.

My thought has always been even if I have full backup do you know how long it would take me to upload the backed up data? It'd be a day or two at least to get back up and running.

Might be worth thinking about buying a backup service. I can't think of the name of the service I used to use, but I might be able to find it looking through old PayPal subscriptions, but I've just had a little look and rackspace seem to offer a service at $5 pm for 10gb space.

Tonight I am going to take my first back-up sine switching to IPB earlier.
I haven't taken any backups.

I plan to start doing backups...every other day.

Forgive me for double-posting, I could not add this to my original post(I can't edit)
but do you do full backups or partials?

Forgot to answer the original question. I do backups pretty much every day, though I do forget occasionally. My host also runs a daily backup using r1soft, but I never rely on anyone else, which I believe is the best way to be when it comes to backups.

Currently my sites are pretty small so the max they ever are is around 120MB which is downloaded in no time.

Previously I've run bigger sites such as a image gallery which was more like 20GB and for that I rented backup space from the company who's name I forgot and had rsync setup so it only copied new and modified files.

I was looking for a backup service and couldn't find anyone who offered it at a reasonable price. Everyone wanted quite a bit of money just to store a copy. If Dropbox was available over FTP, I'd back up there.

How big are your backups?

I don't know if you're a member over at webhostingtalk, but if not you should probably take a peek over there.

The one I'd worry about is about 15GB. I'd probably want to do a full backup once a week and a DB dump daily. Actually rsync would probably be even better and save me some bandwidth.

I'm a member of WHT, I'll pop over during hte week.

I think databases tend to make rsync backups slightly more complicated, but wht is the best place to ask I'd say.

If your current server has decent bandwidth a small vps might even be an option if your comfortable with harden in it yourself.

I usually do it 3-4 times a week but lately have been slack with it.

Use to do backups every 8hrs on one server, but these days it's every 24hrs with 2 sets of backups, one local to the server + one remotely transferred backup to a 3rd party remote backup service provider. Using backup scripts I wrote from ground up for my own sets of data i.e. 10 day retention and rotating backups (~60GB data set size just for more busy sites other sites are just file serving ~140GB).

check out webbycart.com, using them US$99/yr with web site discount coupon for 100GB storage backup space via rsync, ftp, sftp, sshd and even works with 3rd party whm/cpanel plugin for backups. Very flexible as you can sshd into backup space and setup cron jobs (writing own scripts) to help keep disk space, and backup retention disk space consumption in check.

okay looks like their promo changed http://www.webbycart.com/promos.htm, use to be double quota + 2 months free on yearly payment. But now changed to just double quota without 2 months free.

I only backed up my forum 2 or 3 times since it has been open for a month. I should backup more often, but I don't. I will backup everyday once we get bigger though.

Automatically every 24 hours. Stored off site in a different data centre

I back up twice daily and whenever I'm modifying the forum. I download the 3 freshest back ups once per week.

I back up files daily and I *used* to backup the databases daily as well... but I've rolled it back to weekly recently since we've never actually had to ever restore anything from backup... and backing up ~100GB of databases is just plain annoying (especially since we keep each backup for a year).

That being said, we pull backups from an otherwise unused slave DB server so it doesn't affect the site while it's happening.

Our host has daily backups which are provided to our customers upon request, but it is recommended to make your own backups. Honestly, backups should be generated based on your needs. Do you have a large forum that contains a lot of posts? Or is it just a static site that rarely changes? These factors vary for each site.

I have a cron job that takes daily backups. That's good, since I always forget to do it myself