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I have two servers running Ubuntu 10.10, placed at two different locations. One is production, and one development.

I wondered, if any of you had experience with backing up, best practices and alike.

I think a smart solution would be to backup the data on the production server to the development server.

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  • Replicating your data to a dev box isn't a good backup solution. You need to make backups to media that is off-site or can be transported off-site.
    – Zoredache
    Dec 25, 2010 at 15:08
  • Don't forget to do test recovers. A backup is no use if you find it dosen't work when you need it! Jun 27, 2012 at 0:23

3 Answers 3

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Setting up something like BackupPC is fairly easy and would give you copies of the production system in the event that it has issues. Backups are not optional. Remember to test your backups regularly as well. Never rely on an untested backup.

The real question is how to handle recovery. Many people want to have a backup system that just automatically takes over if the primary system is down. This is very hard and if done wrong will probably lead to downtime rather than preventing it.

At the other end of the spectrum, is just having a copy of all the data so that you can recover the production box (or some sub-section of it) in the event that it is needed. This is easier to setup, though obviously you may have hours of downtime as you recover the data and get things set back up and tested for production.

If you have databases, don't forget to make sure the backups get consistent copies of this data. I tend to just do a "dump" of the data daily to a file and use that for backups, some people prefer to back up the journal files for re-creating the databases, or use snapshots to get a point-in-time copy to backup from. For most of my own uses a dump is fine and the simplicity wins out.

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Along the same response but I would look at bacula. It handles multi sites well. I am currently using it to backup 100s of gbs between sites. It does take some time to learn but once it is set up its stable. If you have questions on setting it up, let me know!

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I would suggest you go with rsnapshot(http://rsnapshot.org/), which is based on the popular backup tool - rsync. It allows you to take incremental and full backup on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis in a secure manner. It is very simple to setup, and can be used with ssh public key authentication.

The link below was written for backing up mysql database, but you can use it for backing up other files too.

http://bash.cyberciti.biz/backup/rsnapshot-remote-mysql-backup-shell-script/

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