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I've been looking at various different options for backuping my main web server. I need 500GB+ of backup. I feel the easiest/most robust option is just to have a second server (owned by a different company, in a different datacentre...) that I rsync everything to every day?

This also actually seems to be the cheapest option (for 1TB of space) as well. Ordered a kimsufi server for €9.99/month last night. It's weak on memory & cpu compared to my main box, but obviously I don't need those things.

This also gives me the option of falling over to that server entirely if I have a catastrophic failure on my current box.

I feel most people go for a "cloud" option for their backup. Am I missing a trick?

I suppose one thing I need to be careful of is if some bad code (malicious or just buggy) removes/screws my sites on box 1, I need to make sure those changes aren't replicated to box 2 before I get to fix it...

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What you suggest is actually what a lot of people do in fact, for exactly the reasons it appeals to you - especially if the second site is ran on wildly different architecture - it's a very sensible option indeed. As for the buggy/malicious angle consider rsyncing asynchronously, every hour/four-hours/daily, that way you have a window of time to stop syncing the 'bad', also consider periodic filesystem snapshotting to prevent similar.

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    I would consider rsnapshot: rsnapshot.org May 13, 2014 at 11:13
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    I guess I didn't want to assume he was on an *nix OS
    – Chopper3
    May 13, 2014 at 11:22
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    Codemonkey's post history gave a strong hint he's talking about *nix OS, likely CentOS. :) May 13, 2014 at 12:05
  • Good spot, well said
    – Chopper3
    May 13, 2014 at 13:48
  • Plus didn't the mention of rsync in the topic point to that? ;) Ah no, wiki tells me there's a Windows port of it. News to me! Thanks for validating my choice @Chopper :)
    – Codemonkey
    May 14, 2014 at 2:59

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