Dobleve

A while back I wrote about our home backup system here, I thought it was time for an update.

We still use the same system I described, but have added another backup storage to it, this time on the web.  By good fortune the same people that host our website also allow us a huge amount of storage, it increases each month we are a customer.  At this point we have over 500mb of storage available, enough to consider backing up our data to their servers too.  

There is a great unix tool for web backups, in fact robocopy that I mentioned before is a simpler version of it.  The tool is rsync, and what it does is incrementally mirror one folder to another, allowing it to be very efficient and only upload things that have changed to our server.  I use it on my Mac which comes with rsync, if you have use Windows you need to get a package of Unix tools and install it, I like Cygwin, its free.

We back up our data to an account on our web server, but that account is not web-accessible, eg you can’t reach it via http or ftp, meaning that while it is stored on a server on the internet its not generally accessible to anyone but us; I prefer that but its also possible to make it web-accessible if you want, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you have a choice.

Backing up becomes simple; from your command prompt, change directories to the place you want to back up, in my case the parent directory that contains my photos directory.  I then do this (substitute the my’s for your account and host) to put the files in the photos directory on our server.  Note that the trailing /’s on the folder names are important.  I get prompted to enter the account password on my server and then the upload begins.  This uses a secure (encrypted) channel to upload the data.

rsync -e ssh -av  photos/ my-account-name@my-web-host.com:photos/

We have a lot of data to upload to our server so it never gets there in one upload session.  No matter, rsync as I said only uploads things that have changed, so when we restart an upload I use the same command and it automatically skips the files it already uploaded and picks up where it left off from the last upload.