BRH.numbera.com

This weekend I came pretty close to losing all my blog posts. My hosting provider moved my site to a different host, and ended up screwing up my MySQL database in the process. I’ve actually got a lot more than just my blog posts in that database, and it was pretty scary for a while there as they restored things from backup. It made me realize that I don’t do nearly a good enough job keeping my own backups. So I revisited my backup strategy, and made a few changes. First, I’m now using automysqlbackup to make a complete backup of my MySQL databases every day. Of course, I’m still using SyncBack to do incremental nightly backups onto an external hard drive, in case my main hard drive crashes. The other new addition is that I’m using S3 Backup to copy all my irreplaceable data to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service every month. This little app is still in beta, but it does a good job of putting incremental backups to S3. I was really surprised to find out just how cheap S3 is - I can back up gigabytes of data and have S3 hold it for just 15 cents per gigabyte. At that pricing I have no problem backing up tens of gigabytes of photos, code, and documents, knowing that if my house went up in a fire I’d be able to get back everything my insurance can’t replace.

Tags: amazon s3, backup, mysql

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.