backups

Summary

I'm working on a backup strategy for our SaaS distro that runs on BOA provisioned cloud vps nodes and I'm looking for feedback. I'll move all of this to a wiki page if it becomes useful and provide the scripts that are currently working for us, as it will be useful for most folk running multiple sites on a single Drupal core.

Use Case

As I'm getting ready to launch a site of significant size, I want to come up with a solid backup plan. In the past, I've either have sysadmins taking care of this with server backups, or I've relied on the host plus backup & migrate module. I also have my local development copy and GitHub copies should all else fail.

What is your Drupal backup process?

Is it okay post questions in GDO so that we don't have to wait for next month's Lightning round? If so, I'm not sure if this is the right place. If it isn't, please reply telling me the correct place. I'm going to assume that questions are okay. (Given the truly basic level of my questions at this point, I'd rather limit my questions to a small, friendly audience). If not, just ignore/delete/whatever.

Aegir has been of great help in managing my sites, there are a few things that would be nice to have though. One of these in automated backups, I did some searching thinking I could put some modules together to do this. I would ideally like to schedule them by hour, day, week etc.

Can anyone inform me on how do configure this?

It would also be great if backups could be sent to a different server, but for now an rsync or scp done by crontab will be fine.

Current backup solutions for Drupal, like the backup module, tend to assume the site is kept inactive during backup, to avoid inconsistency problems; then export the DB and files, and archive them somehow, in order to restore the site in the event of a complete data loss.

While this is fine for smaller and less active sites, a better mechanism for bigger sites sould provide the ability to have:

Hello, I've recently submitted this patch for the backup module which allows automated regular backups of a Drupal installation to Amazon S3. It currently uses Geoffrey Gaudreault's Amazon S3 PHP class, which requires the Crypt_HMAC and (hacked) HTTP_Request PEAR modules, as well as forcing the site developer to alter some variables within the code of the class. I'm hoping the File API will offer a much easier way to integrate the backup.module with Amazon S3.