Recently, I've been testing new backup procedures on one of our BIG Folio servers. Its working quite well so far. For those of you who have dedicated servers, large hosting accounts, or use *nix-based servers in your studio, this might be interesting. In fact, with some tweaking, this could apply to Mac users as well.

Most hosting providers will offer a tape-based or managed backup as an option with a dedicated server. While its essential, it can also get expensive and chew up a lot of bandwidth. Here are some DIY alternatives. Be warned, these techniques can get a bit geeky and I take not responsibility if you blow up your server.

Database backups

Our sites–and many other photography sites/tools/blogs–rely on MySQL databases to store vital information. Here is a nice tutorial on dumping your MySQL database daily (via cron) and then syncing it to a remote location (via rsync).

File backups

As I mentioned in my previous post, I backup high-res JPEGs of all my photography to an Amazon S3 account. Well, there is a sweet little Ruby script called s3sync which basically mirrors the functionality of rsync but will sync files to an S3 bucket instead of a remote server. Using this forum thread and this article, I was able to install Ruby 1.8.6 and s3sync on a RedHat Linux server. I then wrote a small shell script which looped through all the sites on the server and synced each one to an S3 account. The initial sync takes quite a while, but subsequent syncs are fast (since only changed files are transferred).

The great thing is, you can access files backed up in this manner FAST. Some FTP clients like Transmit support S3 connections, allowing you instant access to your S3 buckets. No more waiting for your hosting company to restore a backed-up folder.

I'm going to explore backing up a Mac using this method and report my results. It should be fairly straightforward since Macs now come with Ruby pre-installed.

Anyway, there you have it. Some nice "roll your own" backup methods for linux-based dedicated servers. YMMV, natch.