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Offiste backups for developers on a budget

I've searched for months for an all-inclusive, low-cost backup solution. Here were my basic requirements:

  1. Off-site datacenter with it's own backup system, so my backups are backed-up.
  2. Software that works, and can be easily scheduled.
  3. Incremental backups.
  4. Versioning.
  5. Multiple jobs.
  6. Support multiple machines... Servers, desktops and laptops.

I looked into most of the online backup services, and while the pricing seemed nice, it was usually per-machine, and backing up a server required an even more expensive business account. Backing up to an external hard drive is great, but I really wanted a true disaster-recovery plan.

In my earlier research into shared hosting, I looked into the costs & limits of many plans. I ended up giving up on them as options, mostly because no shared plan could handle the number of requests/second I needed. A few weeks later, I realized that the huge storage sizes and virtually unlimited bandwidth would be perfect for doing backups. But I needed to find some FTP software that would really handle what I needed. I searched high and low for free solutions, to no avail. I tested a bunch of shareware/commercial solutions, and a majority of them were too buggy to use. I eventually settled on Backup4all Professional. At under $50/license (it goes down as you buy more copies), it is priced reasonably. In addition to standard backup program features, it also supports backup via FTP, versoning, incremental backups, multiple jobs, email notification and file encryption, all wrapped up in a nice Windows GUI.

As far as the shared hosting service, I ended up picking DreamHost. I know that there are a ton of people who have had good and bad experiences with them, and I'll say that so far my experiences have been... average. There was a small DNS hiccup during my registration, but an email to tech support had it fixed within the hour. But to be honest, I chose them for their price (around $10/mo, depending on what payment plan you choose) and features....

  1. Ever-increasing bandwidth and storage: Every week, you get a modest boost in storage and bandwidth. Currently, you get an increase of 1Gb of disk and 16gb of transfer. If, as a web developer, you can add more than that, you probably can afford a more appropriate solution.
  2. Subversion support. After I signed up, I found out that you get your own free Subversion setup. It's nice to not have to manage it myself and just create new repositories via the web control panel.

Even with quite a few home and production machines, I have room and bandwidth to spare. Since my backups occur at low-traffic times (i.e. while I'm sleeping), I haven't had any problems with servers being overloaded or down. The bottleneck at home is my DSL line's upstream speed, but from my production servers, they seem to go more or less as fast as the lines can handle.

Overall, I have yet to find a solution that can beat the value of this setup. With a little cash up front (probably about what you'd spend on an external hard drive), and a low monthly fee, you too can have professional-strength data recovery.

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Comments
# Posted By tony petruzzi | 6/20/07 10:46 AM
I hear good things about amazon s3. It's cheap too.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261...
# Posted By rob | 6/20/07 10:49 AM
I ended up doing exactly the same thing with Backup4all, but I think that godaddy's hosting seems pretty similar to dreamhost. $7/month for 100gb of storage and 1000gb of transfer. Plus you can add on coldfusion support for $2/month
# Posted By Jordan Clark | 6/20/07 11:50 AM
www.mozy.com .. they've got a free 2gb option
# Posted By Geoff Bergey | 6/20/07 12:36 PM

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