Website Backups

[andypitts]

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum but it's not exactly web dev... We have a Joomla-based website for parents to access all of the latest school news and activities. There's a very strong media focus to the website with hundreds, probably thousands, of photos and the amount of video on the site is growing each year. We do clear out the site each year, starting from a relatively clean slate but by the end of last year our website backups were around 8GB, so next year I'm anticipating at least 10GB. I currently use Akeeba backup (a Joomla extension) to backup the whole site to the hosting server and I also have a copy sent to an Amazon S3 bucket.

 

The problem is it is just incredibly unwieldy, there's no notion of an incremental backup so every week we get a new multi-gigabyte backup. Akeeba (or conflicting settings on our web-host) is unreliable for these large backup sizes so the backups sometimes work and sometimes timeout - therefore requiring manual intervention and multiple backup attempts.

 

The website is access-controlled, making it difficult to host the media elsewhere and retain the same level of security/seamless of use. Also, the media is served by SlideShowPro (another Joomla extension) and I don't know how well this would react to having to access content outside of the Joomla folders.

 

Our primary website is only a few hundred MB so this is easy to manage but the "parent portal" I've described website is a different beast. I'm not looking for a specific solution to this problem (unless you have one!) but I'm very interested to hear how others manage their backups of large websites.

[twin--turbo]

Well, our servers are on site. So a script each night just TGZ's the files and the database dump and copies them over to a NAS in another building. So in our case size/speed is not a constraint.

 

There has been mootings of moving it out of house though. I could probably still SCP it over during the night to our own servers though if that does happen.

 

Rob