Recommended Way To Backup?

[ontarget]

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Hi all,

I've recently realised the importance of backing up! Ideally:

- I would like to automatically backup my mysql DB (many DB's but all within the same login on 1 server).
- Backup all hosted server files (on one server & one login)

Would like to do this weekly and preferably automatically and I guess backup to my home PC/harddrive.

Does anyone know what the best options are? What do you guys do?

Many Thanks

Cheers

[Steved]

Hey there

I'm not sure about regular database backup, I think you have to set a cron job, but I'm waaay too un-technical to get that set up.

If you're using Wordpress you can try WP-DBManager 2.40, or whatever the latest version is.

[moneysavingspy]

Who are you hosting with? They might offer automated backups, perhaps even FTP them somewhere for you - though they might charge for this.

Might be worth giving them a call!

Mani

[ontarget]

Hi there thanks both for replies.

Have looked at wp database back ups, my trouble is that as Im running multiple sites I would have to instal multiple back up plugins and set them up - I guess thats a soloution I may have to do but was wondering if there is a way to just backup the enitre database at once.

moneysavingspy - Im hosted with eukhost, I think they may offer a backup service, but was hoping/seeing if there were any free options?

Cheers

[moneysavingspy]

You've probably seen this, but they definitely offer manual backups, which basically give you a great big ZIP file with your webroot and database inside. I'm not sure if they offer more, though having dealt with them before, I bet they would offer you something if you called them and asked.

We used to use them for our hosting, but their servers were a little unreliable. Cheap, though - not a bad place to be hosted if you still have low traffic. Are you on a shared hosting plan or dedicated? We were on shared hosting and the MySQL server used to be reset every hour or so causing errors on our site for a minute or so - quite annoying!

We also had this weird problem (which was never resolved) where I'd be banned by the server firewall (at least I assume this was what was happening) every now and again for a few minutes for no apparent reason. So it would look to me like the site was down. Never worked out if this problem was at their end, but since moving the hosting I've not had this reoccur.

Sorry for going on a tangent there, but hopefully you find this info useful!

Mani

[ontarget]

Hi Mani,

Thanks for the response, I seem to be getting on fine with eukhost, although not massive traffic - prob around 1k a day across a few sites. Am on a shared server (was on dedicated but it wouldnt do some things I needed). Database seems to work fine too and do a fair bit of datafeed work.

Thanks though I'll check to see about their backup service.

What hosts are you with now?

Cheers

[moneysavingspy]

Sounds like you're pretty lucky with the DB server they put you on. Ours would be restarted every hour or two, giving us 'MySQL has gone away' errors until it came back. This would only last for a minute or two at a time but it wasn't ideal - especially when we'd find these errors in Google's cached versions of our pages!

To be honest Eukhost were pretty much unbeatable on price so if you're getting what you need from them then that's good to hear. Backup is definitely the way to go, though - they have has some pretty major server failures in the past. One was about 6-8 weeks ago - all the sites on one of their servers were down for days. I'm not sure if data was lost, though. I can ask my friend - he had a site hosted there, still does I think.

We moved to Webfusion, they offered 24/7 support and their dedicated servers seemed pretty good value (and they manage the server updates for you - not seen any happen yet though). We've been with them for about 6 weeks now and - touch wood - the server has yet to even be restarted. 100% uptime. Fingers crossed it carries on this way. I guess you find out the real value of a hosting company when something actually goes wrong, though - the ones that fix it quickly and painlessly are worth their weight in gold...

Mani