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I have a few websites, hosted on other people's server. To ease my system admin maintenance task I am thinking about using scripts or software tool to do the backup automatically ( I don't want to manually click on a batch script or configure this and that every time whenever I have to do backup).

Is there any tools you can recommend?

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I wrote a system to do exactly what you're requesting. It'll allow you to backup sites over FTP or SSH/SFTP, and also supports backups of MySQL databases. Backup Machine automatically accesses your site on a daily basis, and incrementally backs up your files, encrypts them, and stores them with Amazon S3.

It's specifically designed for website owners who don't have full server access.

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Well, im in the same boat as you and heres what I am thinking about doing:

  • Setup a cron job to tar the files into a single archive (or one for every site, or however you want to organize it
  • Use a dropbox account and copy the files into the account which will send them offsite (the service is Amazon's S3 under the hood)
  • Schedule to create the archives again and overwrite the ones in your dropbox folder - when this happens dropbox will only update the deltas and version the file appropriately (more details in a question I answered here)

If the sites arent too big this should work pretty well.

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  • Thanks! You got the scripts with you?
    – Graviton
    Aug 25, 2009 at 14:36
  • Well I'd recommend writing your own, it should be only a few basic shell commands and theres lots of resources online for scripting and scheduling jobs
    – barfoon
    Aug 25, 2009 at 14:38
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It would be a lot more efficient to use rsync to backup only changed files. Backing up all files each time is slow and uses lots of space.

We use Duplicity software to store encrypted incremental backups on the rsync.net service. It runs from a cron job.

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  • Personally, I disagree. Always having a single archive with the latest webfiles outweighs the cost of creating it each time. If its a small set of files it wont take much time or CPU to create it.
    – barfoon
    Aug 25, 2009 at 15:14
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Dirvish is a wonderful tool for incremental backups, using rsync. Relatively easy to setup, and has all the bandwidth benefits of rsync.

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