Okay, I’m a little paranoid about losing data (or as my wife puts it, pain-in-the-ass OCD). So as the data on this server has grown to 20+gigabytes, its been a challenge figuring out how to back it up in case of a failure at the data center, and also how to capture regular snapshots.
The current scheme is this. First I signed up with BQBackup.Com which is a New York-based company that specializes in hosting for online backups. $20/month buys 100gb of storage.
Second, I set up an rsync job in crontab so that every morning at 4 a.m. rsync starts on the server and syncs with my BQBackup site.
Finally, I installed Linux on my MSI Wind and created a couple of cron jobs that at 6 a.m. download the MySql databases from the main server, then rsync with the BQBackup site, and finally write the resulting 20gb to a year-month-day.tar.gz file. Throw those on a hard drive and store at an undisclosed location offsite.
And just in case that all fails, the files on the MSI Wind get backed up to Jungle Disk along with the other 300gb or so of personal data I really can’t afford to lose.