Infi-Zeal's Blog

Demystifying Backups Backups are a crucial part of our digital lives, yet they don't always get the love they deserve. Keeping backups is sometimes confusing, thanks partly to the jargon — should I have "differential" backups or is a "full system image" a better way? To address questions like these, this article sheds light on all aspects of backups, from its basic definition, to information that can help you perform the kind of backups you need. Backing up data is the process of making a copy (or more) of our data files—documents, spreadsheets, presentations, e-books, movies, music, browser bookmarks, settings, installed programs—almost everything. Fundamentally, the questions are: What to backup? When to backup? Where to backup? What type of backups to perform? Do you need more than one backup? Types of backups The simplest way to back anything up is to just dump the files onto a CD, DVD or USB drive. Such kinds of backups usually lead to disorganis...

Website Backup with Rsyn If you pay for web hosting in order to run any kind of web-based application—from your WordPress blog to a nameplate site to a file-sharing service to a social media data archive—you need to back up your web server's data the same way you back up your computer's data. On database-driven web sites, there are two kinds of data you want to preserve and restore in case of disaster: the files that make up your site (the PHP/Perl/Python, JavaScript, CSS files, etc), and the contents of your database. Further, any good backup system should make both a local copy and a remote copy of the backed-up data. I run several database-driven sites and applications, including this blog, so my backup system has to be solid. Here's how I have it set up. This method assumes a few things: You're running a LAMP-based web site (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python). You have command line access to your web server via SSH. You know how to make ne...