Recommended provider or hosting company for nightly offsite backup 2Gb+

[dstanley]

I am using the 4PSA total backup solution.

Can anyone recommend a hosting company or FTP provide who could take a nightly backup from my server via FTP? these are generally greater than 2Gb in size.

At the moment I am using 1&1 Hosting but they time out mid transfer.

Thanks in advance.

 

[faris]

Hi,

What we do is use Amazon's S3. It is very cost effective, and if you choose the EU storage cluster as opposed to the US one, you should find transfer rates are brilliant and never time out.

There is one slight problem, and that is that Amazon does not support FTP "out of the box" (or didn't the last time I looked) though I think a few third parties have created FTP interfaces, though these sort of add to the cost.

Your alternative then is to use a Ruby script called s3sync on your locally stored 4PSA backup, via a cron job that you'd set to run after the 4PSA backup has completed.

Obviously you would need to install Ruby (not ruby on rails -- just Ruby) and a modern one not an old one (so you'll probably need to compile it because I think the RPMs that are out there are quite old versions) but that's trivial really.

Basically s3sync works like rsync only is synchs with Amazon S3.

I can't remember the URL off-hand -- just search for s3sync and ruby you should find it easily. If I recall correctly there is an unmaintanted Perl version of the script too, but I think it might be best to avoid that one.

The author of the Ruby version of s3sync has an excellent support forum attached to the site and responds to questions and comments very quickly.

Faris.

 

[dstanley]

does anyone else have any other suggestions?

 

[faris]

You can look at www.ibackup.com -- they offer FTP-based backups.

Incidentally there are products you can use with Amazon S3 that add a virtual device to Linux which you can then back up to as though it was a local device. I didn't look into that much though.