In follow-up to the previous post, I am compiling this as a separate post as this solution is been running very stable for a while with quite a few updates and changes...
I will be setting up a back-up of a remote web-host via rsync over ssh and creating the snapshot style backup on the local machine.
The backups are done incremental, only the files that have changed are backed up so there is very less bandwidth used during the backup and also does not cause any load on the server.
These are sliced backups, meaning that you get a full backup of the last 4 days, and the last 4 weeks. So data can be restored for upto a month of back date.
Below is an example listing of backups you would see.
Mar 11 - daily.0
Mar 10 - daily.1
Mar 9 - daily.2
Mar 8 - daily.3
Mar 5 - weekly.0
Feb 27 - weekly.1
Feb 20 - weekly.2
Feb 13 - weekly.3
Each of those is a full snapshot for the particular day/week. The files are all hard-linked and would only require 2 to 3 times the space used on the server. The backups should consist of web, database, email and some of the important server configuration files.
