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

[Mark Aufdencamp]

I'll weigh in with a bit of a different philosophy than most.  I prefer
to backup at a more granular level then as a disk image/filespace.

1. I utilize puppet to spin up my virtual hosts.

2. I have bash scripts to provision/de-provision various services. ie.
HostingAccount, VirtualHost, MySQLDatabase, WordPressInstance,
JoomlaInstance, SVNRepositoryGroup, SVNRepository, VirtualMailDomain,
VirtualMailbox, etc..

3. I have bash scripts to backup/restore each of the defined services
datasets. (Some items such as HostingAccount and VirtualHost are pretty
much MetaData only)

4. cron'd rsync or scp to move the granular datasets from the home
server to secondary location.  This can be a redundant server instance,
disk space on my master workstation, or even a USB stick.

This provides me the ability to not only backup/restore a server
instance, but also enables the ability to easily move accounts among
servers.

Mark Aufdencamp
Mark at Aufdencamp.com

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [colug-432] What's the best way to back up a remote VPS?
> From: Rob Stampfli <res at colnet.cmhnet.org>
> Date: Mon, June 17, 2013 11:48 pm
> To: Central OH Linux User Group - 432xx <colug-432 at colug.net>
> 
> 
> 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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