Solved How do you backup your VPS servers?
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@IRJ Cloudways run on top of Digital Ocean. You would still be using Digital Ocean
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@IRJ said:
I built a new VPS on Digital Ocean and I would like to start backing it up. Digital Ocean offers weekly backups in their plan, but I am interested to see what solutions some of you use your VPS servers.
Image backups are a big piece of a typical VPS strategy. We use that. What you typically do in a DO style VPS scenario is leverage the image backups and then take any special backups that you need (like a database backup) and use rsync or something similar to ship key data backups off as needed.
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how do you take image backups?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
how do you take image backups?
DO does this for you, just don't turn it off.
I thought it was mentioned DO only did backups weekly?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
how do you take image backups?
DO does this for you, just don't turn it off.
It's an extra service, but it's only 10% extra so It is worth doing. You can also take snapshots. I am not sure how long they retain them.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
how do you take image backups?
DO does this for you, just don't turn it off.
I thought it was mentioned DO only did backups weekly?
Yes, a weekly image of your system. It would be pretty rare that your images would need to be updated more often than that. Your data might need to be backed up often, maybe every five minutes, but you can do that in different ways depending on what you need to back up. It really isn't a generic answer beyond that - you'd want to get into specifics. Like what if you have MySQL and need daily backups or it is a file server and you need changes every fifteen minutes.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
how do you take image backups?
DO does this for you, just don't turn it off.
I thought it was mentioned DO only did backups weekly?
For a webserver that is all you need. Wordpress will be backed up seperately, daily.
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@IRJ said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
how do you take image backups?
DO does this for you, just don't turn it off.
It's an extra service, but it's only 10% extra so It is worth doing. You can also take snapshots. I am not sure how long they retain them.
If you are using tools like Chef, Puppet or Ansible as they are intended then image backups wouldn't be necessary. Depends if you are treating it like VPS or treating it like DevOps Cloud.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
how do you take image backups?
DO does this for you, just don't turn it off.
It's an extra service, but it's only 10% extra so It is worth doing. You can also take snapshots. I am not sure how long they retain them.
If you are using tools like Chef, Puppet or Ansible as they are intended then image backups wouldn't be necessary. Depends if you are treating it like VPS or treating it like DevOps Cloud.
I am not really sure how to handle this
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@IRJ said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
how do you take image backups?
DO does this for you, just don't turn it off.
It's an extra service, but it's only 10% extra so It is worth doing. You can also take snapshots. I am not sure how long they retain them.
If you are using tools like Chef, Puppet or Ansible as they are intended then image backups wouldn't be necessary. Depends if you are treating it like VPS or treating it like DevOps Cloud.
I am not really sure how to handle this
Well the thread has VPS in the title, so I'm expecting that this doesn't apply to you but I wanted to throw this out there as it is an important consideration for backups and thinking about these things. I've got an Ansible lab project coming up soon and I'll demo some of this thinking there.
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So I guess a better question would be what are my options? What are the pros and cons for each option?
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@IRJ said:
So I guess a better question would be what are my options? What are the pros and cons for each option?
Let's start with your workload. What are you running and what are your recovery needs?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
So I guess a better question would be what are my options? What are the pros and cons for each option?
Let's start with your workload. What are you running and what are your recovery needs?
I am running a Wordpress site. My recovery needs would be a week on the server and daily on Wordpress\database.
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@IRJ said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
So I guess a better question would be what are my options? What are the pros and cons for each option?
Let's start with your workload. What are you running and what are your recovery needs?
I am running a Wordpress site. My recovery needs would be a week on the server and daily on Wordpress\database.
Okay, this should be pretty easy then. WordPress has built in backup tools available. Use those to automate getting a database backup to the filesystem. No need to know MySQL or MariaDB at all.
Now the hard part... to where to send the backup...
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Do you have another server or any sort or a desktop or something? Where would you want to store the database backup? I would typically start by looking to Rsync the files daily off to another UNIX server or NAS device somewhere.
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But you could script stuff to send to S3 or other cloud service, to email the files, etc. Tons of options.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
So I guess a better question would be what are my options? What are the pros and cons for each option?
Let's start with your workload. What are you running and what are your recovery needs?
I am running a Wordpress site. My recovery needs would be a week on the server and daily on Wordpress\database.
Okay, this should be pretty easy then. WordPress has built in backup tools available. Use those to automate getting a database backup to the filesystem. No need to know MySQL or MariaDB at all.
Now the hard part... to where to send the backup...
Updraft Plus is a cool Wordpress plugin that backs up the entire site to other cloud hosted file storage. I have mine being backed up to Google Drive.
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@coliver said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
So I guess a better question would be what are my options? What are the pros and cons for each option?
Let's start with your workload. What are you running and what are your recovery needs?
I am running a Wordpress site. My recovery needs would be a week on the server and daily on Wordpress\database.
Okay, this should be pretty easy then. WordPress has built in backup tools available. Use those to automate getting a database backup to the filesystem. No need to know MySQL or MariaDB at all.
Now the hard part... to where to send the backup...
Updraft Plus is a cool Wordpress plugin that backs up the entire site to other cloud hosted file storage. I have mine being backed up to Google Drive.
I just set that plugin up. Thanks for mentioning it.
