Really Slow Today

I use rsync for nightly backups, but a few times a year I like backing everything up into one package and saving those packages on different machines. Hopefully we never need those backups. :D
Consider creating the tarball on the rsynchronized machine(s) rather than the live server. It makes getting a true snapshot easier since it isn't a moving target.

Do any compression after the tar file has been moved to storage where it won't impact forum operation.
 
rsync is slow the first time around because it does a file-by-file copy of everything.

sftp is slow because it uses FTP to do a file-by-file copy while adding the (unnecessary) complexity of encryption.

Using a USB drive is doubtless the best solution as it doesn't involve a live computer and it can be put in a safe where almost nothing can touch it. This is what I do at the business installs that I maintain. USB drives up to 8TB are relatively cheap and capacities reach to 20TB now for a single spindle.
 
Hard to use USB when one computer is 1200 miles away. :D
That's a problem for using USB to be sure.

My VPS solution was to lease a second VPS and make rsync backups every few minutes. That way when I want to download them (or rsync them with a local machine), I don't have to beat my primary server to death. Downloading doesn't take any supervision on my part and I often throttle it (using rsync's built-in bandwidth limiting) to avoid gumming up other activities.
 
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I have our old server down in my basement, and its rsynced two times a day to that.

Again I wanted to do another backup that was offsite that wasn't at the ISP or at my house.
 
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It's not a bad idea. I've seen plenty of sites/servers go down and not have a viable backup
This is much less likely these days as more and more servers aren't running Windows as their underlying operating system. My mail server has been running for 561 days straight and the only reason that it hasn't been longer is that I moved to a new server. I rsync the e-mails every hour to a 9 year old desktop in my home's basement running the latest Debian release.
 
This is much less likely these days as more and more servers aren't running Windows as their underlying operating system. My mail server has been running for 561 days straight and the only reason that it hasn't been longer is that I moved to a new server. I rsync the e-mails every hour to a 9 year old desktop in my home's basement running the latest Debian release.
I'm not really sure where Windows came into that
 
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