Last week, in an email that began with the words "in an effort to keep you, the customer, better informed about important events" - my web host informed me of a raid-disc failure that resulted in total loss of all my websites on that server.

There are no backups - despite claims on their website that my data was protected with Raid-1 discs and daily Veritas tape backups, a statement which appears to be a lie.

I am now starting to do XOOPS sites and I need something better than this, either as a service level agreement or as part of the service. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

I am looking for a host with a reseller account that will:

1) Guarantee to perform daily backups of my websites and MySQL databases and guarantee that these will be safe if the web/database server bursts into flames or gets hacked to death by the 'un-root crew'.

2) Guarantee to restore all my sites, a specific domain, database, folder (or even a single file if I want) within an agreed timeframe from the previous day's backup.

3) Provide backups as part of the contract and undertake restores either under the contract, or on demand for a fixed fee.

Nearly all the shared and VPS solutions I have looked at make a big deal about one-click backups - but they are all stored on the same physical drive or machine. Even my own PC backups go onto CD then into a fire-safe. I need my host to do better than that.

The most promising solution I have seen up to now is Hotchilli Data Vault but I would be interested to know of anything similar.

For Linux hosting I need:

PHP 4.*
GetText
IonCube run-time loading
Smarty
GD2 (ImageMagik would be nice)
MySQL 4.* (InnoDB)
Decent allocation (pref unlimited) MySQL DBs
PHPMyAdmin
CGI
Cron
SSH
Decent amount of space on a fast server
No 777 folder restrictions
Decent backbone, speed and uptime
Decent bandwidth allowance
Email + webmail per domain with decent POP box allocation
CPanel (preferred)
UK host with a telephone number
Credit card billing (auto if additional services purchased)
Paper invoices
Online account/invoice checking
Ticket and telephone tech support (not a call centre)

Happy to consider shared or VPS. Dedicated probably too expensive for me at present.

Why rely on a webhost for this at all. You can do it much better yourself.

Most webhost I have used do backups, but they are used mostly only for their personal server problems.

I have sites that I backup files (when changes are made) nightly database backups and sync them to my computer every day or so with FTP.

This way I know if I am hacked, server crashes, or the host ceases to exist, I can get my site up and running quickly with little dataloss as possible.

I have 2 articles on the frontpage spotlight on my site on automating database backups and restoring with cron.

Thx jdseymour. That is certainly an option. I just imagined that FTP synching with a large number of dynamic sites plus MySQL dump downloads would be a problem. I suppose however it would ultimately be cheaper for me to upgrade my broadband connection than pay for an SLA. Need to check how this would impact my bandwidth allowance though.

I'll take a look at your tutorials.

I remember that daily backups used to be a feature in most hosting packages, but responsibility for this seems to be passed to the webmaster. Last year a friend of mine lost his sites the same way through his host's raid disc failure. I thought they were designed to prevent data-loss?

Most host will tell you they have a backup feature in place for emergencies. But usually they also stress not to rely on their backup scheme as theirs is for the entire server, and yours should be for the individual site. My host does have a feature of offline (remote computer backup) and my VPS is allowed one manual offsite backup, which I utilize just before I make any changes to the OS or packages.

I still rely on my cron jobs to protect my sites.

Could you share your wisdom on FTP-Synch?. I have seen a couple of FTP apps that will do it, but would welcome any tips/product recommendations.

For example, do you automate the synch operation from your PC, or is that a server-side process? I assume you can set it up to automatically do an incremental backup/download of multiple sites all in one go?

I use one of the backup modules for Xoops. I can save locally or send to an email address which is a nice option since GMail has a 2 gig limit now. If you save locally, it lets you determine how many copies to backup. Not all of the backup modules do restores as well.

The module I use has instructions on setting up a chron job to automate the backups if the OS the site is on supports chron.

I found mine here by doing a seach on backup modules.

for my normal everyday edit's i just use a normal FTP program like ftp surfer..

but for backing up sites etc, i always use a free piece of software called FTPSync

you put in the usernam, pw, server address and path etc.. and then when it connects it lists all the files on the server in that path, then i hit compare and it will download every single file from the server (you can of course deselct folders or files) initially the 1st time may take a long while.. but once done and if you do it regularly the consecutive backups don't take long nas it will only download files that are new or updated (it compares the file date/times). then you have a complete replica of your site..

if you edit a file or add folders etc to the folder on your hard drive (the backup) ftpsync will also compare and if you require it will update the server with the newest files and leave out any files that are identical.. it can be set to do it automatically.

Quote:

For FTP as well as windoze file management I use Directory Opus, it is an old amiga program (well completely rewritten for) ported to windows. It also has extensive commandline options as well as custom toolbars. I have not automated the process, just because as I work on the site every day it is easy for me just to sync as I work. But it can be done with DOpus and the task scheduler.

Thx for that info.

@m0nty So, setting a cron driven MySQL dump for all the site DBs at 11 pm and then setting FTPSynch to run on each site at midnight would do the job?.

BTW I've discoverd the aforementioned 'Data Vault' service is only for dedicated servers.

I don't know if this helps at all because I do agree that making your own website backup is very important. My XOOPS site is hosted with 4uhosting.co.uk who I know do do backups.

They recently recovered all data on one of their servers from backup following the failure of a disk in that server. They also have a backup function available through the members area to dump of the website (the actual files) and a copy of the MySQL DB to a gz file which can then be downloaded and stored, daily incremental backups are also possible.

As I said, I don't know if this helps anyone and I am not intending this to be an avert for them but I thought I would drop it in there just in case.

Jonathan