Richy's Random Ramblings

I just thought I’d let everybody know about the backup systems I have in place for various things – it is always good to have backups, and it’s worrying how few people actually run them….

For backing up my website(s), I’ve got a nice 20Gb of storage space from BQ Backup. This 20Gb of space (costing me $10 per month) is hosted in Lower Manhattan (New York) – so it’s the other side of the Atlantic than my UK based Memset VPS account which is in Fareham, South Hampshire and Reading, Berkshire. At the moment, I’ve got cPanel/WHM backing up to BQBackup every night via FTP – but BQBackup also supports rsync backups over SSH (but WHM isn’t too supportive of that method).

For home backups, I do occasionally (bad Richy!) backup to to CDs or DVDs or any of 12 external hard drives I’ve got connected via USB – but that doesn’t cover me in the event of a house fire. I’ve therefore just signed up with Mozy.com (which I came across via “Just A Guy Made Of Dots And Lines“). They offer 2Gb of free storage space – so it’s worth giving it a go (and if you sign up using the referal code T9RF78 or just follow this link to Mozy.com I’ll get another 256Mb of space). Their system works with Windows Vista, XP, 2000, or Mac OS X 10.4 (with a few others in Beta) and will automatically detect your Thunderbird/Outlook configuration and data files (so now more hunting down long paths) and you can setup your own configuration if you want (with your own encryption key). More (“unlimited”) space is available for $4.95 per month.

If I could afford to do so, I’d set up a secondary server somewhere and run R1Soft‘s backup system on it as it’s extremely good (I helped set it up for usage by FreeVirtualServers.com and DiYHost.co.uk) but does require it’s own server and it doesn’t work that well via NAT’ed connections (such as our home connection).

Hope this post helps someone else protect their data!