Backup software and services

Has anyone tried backup software or online backup services?

I am looking for one, because I am too lazy to do my backup manually. I often forget about it.

The backup software I found:

Site Vault, SmartBackup, Handy Backup

The online web backup service:

Novosoft Remote Backup

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I liked the Novosoft solution. They backup your website and keep all the files online. No need to download them to your computer. Prices are also affordable.

I think I will go with their trial version.

Any thoughts or advice about backup solutions?

 

Can I interest you in a bag of magic beans?

You are seriously considering leaving all your backups in the hands of a third party and not downloading your own copies? :frown:

When their server goes down, as it will eventually, and they lose the ability to restore your data what exactly will you do? Wave their sales brochure at them while all your hard work goes down the drain?

By all means use a third party backup service but ONLY if you copy the backup files regularly down to your own storage as well.

My 2c

 

[Disclaimer: This is from the POV of a server owner/hosting provider]

I use/rely on R1Soft CDP (Server Backup Software and Continuous Data Protection from R1Soft for Windows and Linux) for my customers and sites (this site is actually on an R1Soft powered server). It can bare-metal a server back to a known good state much more quickly than a fresh OS reinstall and backup restore (total downtime with R1Soft is 2-4 hours, if that vs a couple of days of actual downtime and then another couple of weeks worth of tweaking).

While I've never heard of the previously mentioned options -- I'm not a big fan of letting other people control your data. I like owning my own data :unhunh:

This is something that would need to be provided to you by your provider -- but, I would suspect that most (if not all) business-grade providers would have such a set up and may even make it accessible to end-users to do their own restores (!).

However - in addition to this, the SAN that we use (a nice NetApp setup, for those who are in the industry) does internal snap-shotting as part of normal operations in addition (RAID 60 array).

Other providers may choose to use different backup media, however, as that is their prerogative.

Even with all of this -- it's still a good idea to maintain your own set of backups, locally or off-site on a trusted system (what happens if your backup provider craps out when you need them most?) in case your primary systems (which in this scenario cost ALOT) fail.

I'm going to take a page from Steve Ballmer here and say --- BACKUPS, BACKUPS, BACKUPS, BACKUPS, BACKUPS.

Now, for some light entertainment, I present to you the speech where Steve Ballmer uttered similar words as above:

YouTube - Developers