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Proper Off-Site Backups Have Been Configured

When the site was hosted with Orcs Web they would backup the server for me as a part of their managed hosting. Now that I'm with Liquid Web and I've opted not to use their $100/month Guardian backup service, backups are on me.

So today I set up a database backup maintenance plan. Every night the server will create full backups for every database in SQL and save the backups to the extra (backup) hard drive in the server. I've got the backups configured to expire after 14 days. Essentially what this means is that I'll have quick restore capability for any day up to 2 weeks in the past.

But that's really not enough. So in addition to this I've signed up for MozyPro off-site backup. I've used MozyHome on my home computer for the past year and I've been pleased with their service. The MozyPro service is slightly more expensive than MozyHome. But MozyHome will not run on a server, so MozyPro it is.

I configured MozyPro to backup nightly just after the database backups occur. So every night the latest database backup files will be uploaded to Mozy's servers. In addition to that, the files that make up the websites themselves are also backed up to Mozy. The cool thing about the MozyPro service is automatic file versioning. They'll actually store 30 days worth of versions of every file that's backed up.

There are a bunch of ways one could go with backups. I came up with this scheme because it's simple, cheap, easily recoverable, and highly redundant. It was easy to set up too. I did all of this in about an hour.

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