Posted by socialtalker on August 10, 2011 at 6:00pm
I hope this is the right place to ask this question. I decided to pay 9 dollars a month to linode for image backup of my vps. right now, its not so important because i keep having to rebuild my disk image and i dont need to save anything. right now, i leave 14% of my vps for backups. but am i supposed to leave 50% of my disk image free for backups? do most people leave half or more of their vps foe backups?
Comments
I suppose this is more a
I suppose this is more a generic backup question than Drupal specific - but still very important. The first question is how much of the disk do you need to backup and how much is recoverable from other sources. All of the Drupal core core is recoverable from Drupal so it does not need to be backed up. All you end up backing up is the clients/projects assets and database. This could be smaller than the code used. You at least need twice that amount of space.
The next question is why are you backing up - disaster recovery or error recovery. Disaster recovery is where you loose the server - gone! You need an off-site copy that is as up to date as possible. Use AWS S3?
For error recovery, you delete a table by mistake (like I did yesterday on a client site) and you need to recover that. Here I keep local copies of the data (assets and database) in daily (6), weekly (4) and monthly (10?) copies. So that is 20 times the space of the live sites already.
Less savings due to compression. Incremental backups save space.
Also if you are syncing with S3 for disaster recovery - your i/o costs will outweigh your traffic and space costs massively. Unless you use backup systems (duplicity?)
Another comment is that if you can put your assets into a CDN immediately, this is a backup in its own right that you can pull back from in the case of a disaster?
Remember DISASTER vs ERROR recovery - two completely different beasts. You need both!
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thanks for responding. I
thanks for responding. I worry about my sites being hacked, especially my network of community sites. you said "off-site"? so a backup shouldnt even be on the vps at all? thats makes sense. I will have to price amazon for a weekly or monthly backup, then. when you say syncing, do you mean by the minute updates? no, dont thing i could do that. i could do local updates of the assets and database, probably every 3 days or so. I dont think i could handle anything more. the CDN i am only vaugely familiar with. looking at, it would be nice to have, but i get afraid of the unknown cost. have you ever used one? i see the free cdn, but i dont trust how it could be free. i would have to think about what i need to do about error recovery, thats a bit hazy.
Another comment on this -
Another comment on this - Linode makes it EASY to clone a VPS. I've done it more than once. Works like a charm...so that is another backup option. Whenever you make some detailed changed you could before and after clone the server and then have the ability to retrieve detailed files. And the beauty of Linode is you can choose the data center - so clone your server to somewhere across the US.
Linode backups do not let you go in and say "I want to restore this file". So even if you do a restore, you have to restore the entire disk image to a VPS that has the space.
how embarassing, i should
how embarassing, i should know that, being on linode. I will have to look into that. i think i will stop paying the 9 dollars for backup on linode and clone a copy somewhere else like on amazon s3 thingy. thanks.