Ask HN: How do you back up your site hosted on a VPS such as Digital Ocean?

Write a little program in your favorite shell or scripting language that

* rsyncs the directories containing the files you want to back up

* mysqldumps/pg_dumps your databases

* zips/gzips everything up into a dated archive file

* deletes the oldest backup (the one with X days ago's date)

Put this program on a VPS at a different provider, on a spare computer in your house, or both. Create a cron job that runs it every night. Run it manually once or twice, then actually restore your backups somewhere to ensure you've made them correctly.

I use config management to build the system (Puppet in my case, purely due to experience rather than strong preference) so it's fully reproducible. I push my data with borg (https://github.com/borgbackup/borg) to rsync.net (http://rsync.net/products/attic.html) for offsite backup.

I use https://www.sosonlinebackup.com.

Stupid simple and stupid cheap. Install, select directories you want backed up, set it and forget it.

All for $7.00 a month.

I use a daily systemd timer on my home machine to remotely back-up the data on my VPS. From there, my home machine backs-up a handful of data from different places to a remote server.

Make sure you check the status of backups, I send journald and syslog stuff to papertrail[0] and have email alerts on failures.

I manually verify the back-ups at least once a year, typically on World Back-up Day [1]

[0] https://papertrailapp.com/ [1] http://www.worldbackupday.com/en/

I use AWS S3 for this as the storage prices are so cheap, at $0.03 per GB. I recommend using a utility called s3cmd, which is a similar to rsync, in that you can backup directories. I just have this setup with a batch of cron jobs which dump my databases and then sync the directories to s3 weekly.