[colug-432] What's the best way to back up a remote VPS?

[Jeff Frontz]

On linode, they give you a shared image that is basically a "live CD"; it
doesn't count against your allocation.  You can boot from it and then copy
your image in to your actual virtual disk (via rsync, ssh/dd, cpio, tar,
whatever).

Jeff


On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 11:48 PM, Rob Stampfli <res at colnet.cmhnet.org>wrote:

> It's becoming harder and harder to find a reasonably priced VPS
> that has built-in backup/restore capabilities, but cheap, unadorned
> VPS providers abound.  So, I've been wondering how does one go about
> rolling his own backup, i.e., backing up the file system on a VPS so
> that, if the VPS does somehow get clobbered, there is a straightforward
> and relatively quick path to reincarnate it again.  Yes, I could
> rebuild it from scratch using my notes, but that would indeed be a
> long day's work.
>
> I'm thinking of acquiring a small VPS to serve solely as my backup machine
> and using rsync to push the entire file system of the VPS I want to back
> up (with certain directories excluded) up to it.  But how to restore it?
>
> If the worst case happens, can I simply reload the original image of
> the impacted VPS that I started from when it was created -- most VPS
> providers allow you to get back to this point -- and then, as root,
> rsync from the backup VPS right over the top of this image, to restore
> the VPS to point it was at when last backed up?
>
> What am I missing?  What are the gotchas here?  I'm interested in
> things like "text file busy" errors, or how it might impact system
> file sharing among the various users of the physical machine on which
> the VPS resides.
>
> Or, are there some free software that would take care of everything
> for me?
>
> What do the rest of you use to back up your field VPSes?
>
> Inquiring minds...
>
> Rob
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