In web development, there is nothing worse than having created a website and losing it to a hard drive crash. Luckily, I’ve yet to have a hard drive crash on me but I’ve heard horror stories from countless people. The need to back up your data is very real and but can be a hassle at times.

Offline Backups?
Backing your files onto CD/DVD or another hard drive is nice but in the case of an accident (house fire, flooding) you have the potential of losing all your data and your backups all at once. Backing up data on to a flash drive could potentially work if you keep that flash drive with you at all times but in my opinion, the only way to safely backup your data is to store it on a remote server somewhere outside of your house. Possible locations include your work, your web server or an online storage system elsewhere.

Doing your Own Backups
If you have a lot of extra disk storage space on your web host, you can easily use that to backup your files. For the lazy, simply zipping up all your files (hopefully not that many) and uploading it will suffice. But if you have a lot of files, this process can be long and tedious. Sure you could do an overnight upload but a little speedbump in your network connection and there goes your file! Luckily, there is a very elegant solution: rsync.

What is rsync?
rsync is a piece of Unix software that does incremental backups. What is an incremental backup? Let’s say you’re working on a large word document and since your last backup, all you’ve done is change a few words here and there and added a couple pages. When you perform your next backup, instead of uploading the whole file, rsync will only upload the changes that were made since the last backup. Not only does this save bandwidth, it will also let you roll back to previous backup states (in case you overwrote something you didn’t mean to).

Rsync is a great piece of software and anyone can use it. Linux users might have it built in or they can download it from the website. Mac users can use RsyncX and Windows users can download Cygwin which provides a Linux-like environment in Windows and run rsync from there. Setting it up can take some time which is why some nice people created various tools to help simplify the task.

Automated Solutions
Personally, I couldn’t be bothered to go through the trouble of setting up rsync. Instead, I use Mozy which is a free online backup solution for Windows. It fully automates the backup process and does incremental backups every night. I’ve been using it for a while and will write a full review of it in the next few days.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
Now I’m not completely disregarding offline backup solutions. It’s useful to have a copy of your files on-hand in case you need to share it with someone or have quick access to it (since it is much faster than downloading your online backups). This doesn’t apply only to your hard drive data, but to your websites and databases as well! Get to know your web host’s backup features and take advantage of them!

So how often do you backup and what do you use to do it? Anyone actually get an rsync script setup and working?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Efficiency, How-to. 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.