I currently have a server in H1 Phase 1 and the recent events have scared me a bit as my current backup solution is merely a secondary hard drive.

I plan on upgrading to a Dual Xeon 3060 and I'm searching for advice on the best backup solution for my needs.

The ideal backup would be a daily backup for every user in /home/ keeping 1 revision, and a daily backup for databases keeping 5 revisions.

Dedicated Backup:

My clients want an automatic fail-over and the closest thing I've seen is to use a dedicated backup server that uses bare metal backups. But is the nature of this backup (compressed, encrypted, etc.) making it so the backup is really only useful for a catastrophe where I would need to restore the entire server? For the more common restore needs (corrupted data, accidental or purposeful database deletions) would this method hinder me from making individual site or file restores?

Even using the dedicated backup server to restore from would require setup of a new server, new IP addresses which would have to be communicated to multiple clients and ISPs then propagated through the internet. It would probably be a 24-hour downtime before all sites were back up anyway.

The cheapest dedicated backup server is $279 / mo. and I don't want to pay that much if the backup type is only going to be useful for a full server restore.

Network Backup:

This is the cheapest solution and since it is off site it covers the catastrophe scenario and since it simply tars files it meets the needs of smaller restorations, but it eats up my alloted bandwidth and from what I've read is not easy to implement autonomy.

DiskSync Backup:

It looks like this would be easier to setup and manage, it doesn't eat up my bandwidth and uses fewer resources (can do incremental backup right?). I had wanted to use RHEL 64-bit and read that disksync was not compatible. Would I lose much by going 32-bit?

-Corie

We've been using R1Soft's CDP for just over a month now. Since we started using it, we had a box completely hacked and had to use R1's "Bare Metal Restore," and it worked like a champ and saved hundreds of accounts.

Needless to say, I HIGHLY endorse using R1's CDP. I've tried most of the rest and nothing compares.

Hey mark, what about individual file accessibility with R1Soft's CDP? What I'm worried about is if I backup daily and one site has a problem, would I have to restore to the previous day for the entire server? All other sites would lose one day of data.

-Corie

Hello Corie,

To address your concerns, the DBS backup solution does allow you to restore individual files from different backups. This way you can have different versions of data depending on the dates. However, when it does backups, it does block level backups of each partition, so you cannot exclude individual files.

The current version of Disksync for Linux is only 32-bit. It will only not run natively on a 64-bit version, but it will as long as the 32-bit libraries are installed.

Both the DBS and Disksync are backup AND storage solutions. However the NAS is only a storage solution for backups. If you want to use the NAS, you will still need a backup solution. This is typically ideal for control panel users, such as Plesk or cPanel users, which include a backup utility.

I hope that answers your questions!

That's very helpful, thank you.

-Corie