After reading of Jeff Atwood’s data loss issues this past week I started thinking about the web servers I look after. The servers are all backed up by the hosting provider – SiteHost – and I have a lot of faith in those backups (I work there, but I have also needed to restore some data in the past and it was flawless), but that didnt stop me from thinking it would be a good idea to start doing backups that I control.
I considered getting another VPS hosted in a separate data-centre and copying data over at frequent intervals (and I might do that at some stage so the traffic can be kept within NZ), but I already had an Amazon S3 account and use it for automated backups of the SVN repositories hosted with Storehouse. So I wrote a little cli app (written in PHP) that tarballs, gzips, and copies the compressed folders up to S3. The config file allows you to specify as many folders as you want and say whether you want them to be backed up daily, weekly, or monthly (these intervals can easily be changed and added to).
For detailed usage, keep reading.