Newbie dares to ask: how do I backup my dedicated server?

Do you have physical access to your server? If you don't have easy access, a bootable CD will be more trouble than it's worth.

I tend to use two strategies of backing up remote servers that I don't have easy access to:

1) I do a full system backup using rdiff-backup. (You'll see that documented in the HowToForge link above.)

2) If you think of your server in 2 parts -- the Debian portion and the other stuff that you tweak/install (everything from web sites to MySQL databases, to customizing Debian files, to third party apps you install).

By thinking of it in these two ways, you can do a "restore" (actually a rebuild) pretty quickly and easily.

Part #1 -- the Debian OS -- can be easily managed. The "dpkg" has a command line switch "--get-selections" which you can redirect into a file (I put mine in /etc). During a rebuild, you can just do a "dpkg --set-selections < /etc/dpkg_selections.txt" and a big update to reinstall all the Debian software you had on the system before the crash.

Of course, you probably edited some of Debian's config files. Thus, backing up all of /etc (e.g. "tar cjvvf /backups/servername_etc.tar.bz2 /etc") is essential.

For all of the rest of the server -- part #2, I make a tar command similar to the above for everything I install, each web site that is created, etc. The only tricky thing is to do MySQL dumps and/or hotcopies for all of the databases.

What I do is to create all of these tarballs -- either with a cron job or via ssh -- in a subdir (e.g. /backups) and then use scp to copy them off the machine and delete them.

Why 2 separate methods? It's overkill, but I'm paranoid. The tarball method also makes it easy to restore a particular subdir or web site since the tarballs get timestamped when they're created.

Let me know if you need any shell script snippets to see what I mean...

I swear by this method. This method provides a full snapshot of your file system at different times. For example, during the past week, you can have 7 daily shapshots. During the past month, you can have four or five weekly snaphsots. During the past year, you can have snaphots of each month. The shapshots are not compressed, but through clever use of hardlinks, you may end up using only slightly more disk space than your installation. That is, even though you have all of these shapshots, the sum total of the backup disk space is only a little greater than your disk usage on your server. The exception to that is if your files change quite often-- then alot of extra disk space is required.

On my home computer, my files use about 95 GB, and my backup (with daily, weekly, and several monthly snapshots) uses 120 GB.

Below are the scripts I use to perform this backup. To restore, you just copy the files back into place. I backup to a second hard disk, but rsync can do remote backups over ssh.

/etc/cron.daily/daily-backup:


#!/bin/bash
rm -rf /backup/daily.7
mv /backup/daily.6 /backup/daily.7
mv /backup/daily.5 /backup/daily.6
mv /backup/daily.4 /backup/daily.5
mv /backup/daily.3 /backup/daily.4
mv /backup/daily.2 /backup/daily.3
mv /backup/daily.1 /backup/daily.2
mv /backup/daily.0 /backup/daily.1
echo 'Doing rsync'
/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --exclude=/backup --exclude /proc --exclude /sys \
--exclude=/backupWin \
--exclude /home/mdfulk/hdtv --exclude /home/mdfulk/TivoRecordings \
--exclude *.mpg --exclude *.nuv --exclude *.iso --exclude /var/chroot \
--link-dest=/backup/daily.1 / /backup/daily.0/
mkdir /backup/daily.0/proc
mkdir /backup/daily.0/sys


/etc/cron.weekly/weekly-backup:


#!/bin/bash
rm -rf /backup/weekly.5
mv /backup/weekly.4 /backup/weekly.5
mv /backup/weekly.3 /backup/weekly.4
mv /backup/weekly.2 /backup/weekly.3
mv /backup/weekly.1 /backup/weekly.2
mv /backup/weekly.0 /backup/weekly.1
cp -al /backup/daily.7 /backup/weekly.0


/etc/cron.monthly/montly-backup:


#!/bin/bash
rm -rf /backup/monthly.5
mv /backup/monthly.4 /backup/monthly.5
mv /backup/monthly.3 /backup/monthly.4
mv /backup/monthly.2 /backup/monthly.3
mv /backup/monthly.1 /backup/monthly.2
mv /backup/monthly.0 /backup/monthly.1
cp -al /backup/weekly.5 /backup/monthly.0