I currently have two dedicated servers. I'm no webmaster by the way

When I leased my servers I took out the management service for about £50 per month, but when they moved one of my sites from the old server they really screwed it up and so I cancelled the management of the server.


I now do manual backups of my whole sites and I backup the databases regularly to my own computer.

In the web host manager panel there is an option to do automatic backups and I wondered if anyone uses this option and how easy it is to set up?

Thanks in advance

It's very easy to get it running - You'll just have to set up a few settings - and it's smooth from there. If you want the backups o remain on the server - then all you really need to do is select the backup interval, and a directory.

If you wish to place the backups directly to your computer - you can setup an FTP server on your home computer, and leave it running. Then you'd just specify the details in the backup settings page. What will happen is - the sever will create the backup and then upload it directly to your computer, without storing it on the server!

Anyways, to answer your question - yes, it's very easy! We're currently running daily backups.

Thanks for the reply.

I will have a go at setting it up when I get chance.

Thanks

chez

Have you ever considered mirroring the two dedicated servers with rsync, then balance traffic between the two? Mirror the databases or put them on a third machine and you'll be able to recover quickly from a site outage. I have set this kind if thing up a number of times, you could too (or hire someone.)

Best,

Justin

Originally Posted by hittjw

Have you ever considered mirroring the two dedicated servers with rsync, then balance traffic between the two? Mirror the databases or put them on a third machine and you'll be able to recover quickly from a site outage. I have set this kind if thing up a number of times, you could too (or hire someone.)

Best,

Justin

I had never considered that to be honest.

At this moment in time the server is very reliable and has only been offline on one occasion for 57 mins in the last 7 months. If it gets to a point where the server is being put under strain then the rsync option could be very useful.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Originally Posted by hittjw

Have you ever considered mirroring the two dedicated servers with rsync, then balance traffic between the two? Mirror the databases or put them on a third machine and you'll be able to recover quickly from a site outage.

It's important not to confuse mirroring with backups, as they're really two different issues - or at least, they protect against different kinds of problems, so require separate consideration as part of an overall DR strategy.

The problem with a mirror based "backup" is that any kind of corruption is usually mirrored as well, (the problem with relying too heavily on RAID1 for example) and therefore you have to keep this in mind...

Originally Posted by DIY

I currently have two dedicated servers. I'm no webmaster by the way

When I leased my servers I took out the management service for about £50 per month, but when they moved one of my sites from the old server they really screwed it up and so I cancelled the management of the server.


I now do manual backups of my whole sites and I backup the databases regularly to my own computer.

In the web host manager panel there is an option to do automatic backups and I wondered if anyone uses this option and how easy it is to set up?

Thanks in advance

WHM usually saves a .tar or gzip version of your site if I remember correctly. Just download that and you will be all set.