How To Back up Servers

It has been suggested that maintaining backups in several places that would not be easy to find would be a sensible policy for Indymedia servers, the idea of this page is to document some ways of doing this and some mistakes to avoid.

Usually you one has to consider how to back up the database, this usually involves using cron to do a db dump every night and then rsync'ing the data over ssh to another machine. Backing up the uploaded data is generally a matter of backing up the uploads directory.

Another thing to consider is that the more backups there are the better, allowing anyone to run a mirror, see MirrorHowTo.

A good ressource about this topic is http://deb.riseup.net/backup/.

Backup software

Software to make backups easier.

Backupninja

Backupninja allows you to coordinate system backup by dropping a few simple configuration files into /etc/backup.d/. Most programs you might use for making backups don't have their own configuration file format. Backupninja provides a centralized way to configure and coordinate many different backup utilities.

MySQL Backup

MySQL backup is a perl script for backing up MySQL databases. It generates a .sql file that is drops and creates tables when it is used to restore the database and it also gz'ed backups.

Duplicity

Duplicity backs directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server. Because duplicity uses librsync, the incremental archives are space efficient and only record the parts of files that have changed since the last backup. Because duplicity uses GnuPG to encrypt and/or sign these archives, they will be safe from spying and/or modification by the server.
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