Backup solution for sirikata.com

[danielrh]

I do not want this to go away

[PatrickHorn]

Just need a cron script on dreamhost. Probably the two things we are concerned about are a mysqldump (or whatever database store we use) and a tarball of the content/names directory (to make sure we don't have any more name collision problems). assets are likely too big for a tarball to make sense--plus, they never can get overridden.

If we're worried about dreamhost itself failing we can make the database dump live inside some server readable directory, and rsync the sqldump along with the content directory (assets and names) to our own systems.

[danx0r]

not clear why this is owned by me (I've not been party to the discussion), nor why the milestone is "MusicDeptDeliverable?" -- I assmue that means MiTo??

[Henrik Bennetsen]

Just looked into what automated backup Dreamhost offer and it is described as item no 2 in this newsletter:

http://www.web-hosting-top.com/web-hosting/newsletter/news/118/dream-host-newsletter-v10.05-may-2008

Disconcerting writeup of the feature here:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Domain_Restore

Info for manual backup here:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Backup_Website_Manually

Is there a script that can get this done automatically?

[PatrickHorn]

There is a tool that does this automatically, and it's called "rsync"

I have copied the whole directory tree to my computer and others with ssh access can do it as well with:
rsync -av user@…:sirikata.com my-sirikata-backup

rsync -av user@…:/home/slartist content-backup

If you run rsync with the same directory, it will recognize files that already exist and only copy the files that have changed, so it is very efficient.

However, there is still the matter of database dumps and "names" backups, which are smaller bits of data that change more often. These would preferably be backed up daily or more by some cron script.