Backup solutions?

For this site we just use a simple bash script. It's not that difficult to put a script together which tars up the files in a site and a mysqldump file.

Usually a hosting companies control panel will provide a way to backup databases and such. I don't really see what market those products are aimed at, people who know what they're doing will write their own scripts, whilst newbies can use the control panels provided by their hosts.

From what I can see from both of those sites, the service they offer is not to actually backup your data, but to be an online storage space for you backups themselves.

We are currently shopping for this type of service ourselves, as we have 85gigs of data, and a full backup (which we do weekly and then incremental during the week) requires over 12 DVD's to be burned.

Now we did look into services that did actually provide the backup software and everything to auto backup to their servers, however for our capacity needs that was gonna run us almost $200 a month.

Using your own backup software/scripts and then store online is nice, just keep security in mind, check out the company as much as possible, and if you can encrypt the data too.

-Greg

Greg, lets we have situation:
I have web hosting somewhere on the Hostgator.com or Serverpoint.com which offer backup solutions with their packages. But I think if their server goes down all my backups will lost. That not really good point for me, and I try to find other place to put my backups like on Santrex.net. I create script and put it on the same hosting I have my web sites hosted.
1. Will it be ok to concentrate data from Serverpoint and Hostgator on Santrex and Gnax.net? Or one backup service enough? Where must the script be runing?
but in this case hosting goes down scripts goes down and no backups?
Or script for becup of Hostgator need to be hosted on Serverpoint.com and vice versa. What is optimal solution?

Ok, first off I am just giving general info here. Don't want anyone to confuse this post as a complaint about the companies mentioned.

That said...

Any hosting company that you choose to have critical site/data with should not only be one with a good proven reputation for business solutions (not likely to close up over night) and have at least nightly backups at hand to restore the server if it should die, but also backup procedures in place in case something happens to their facilities. So in general, first defense (hosting companies backups) should be plenty to begin with for a good majority of non e-commerce sites.

Now as to the questions as I understand them:

I think you are asking about putting backups on multiple servers, if so, yes defiantly possible, needed probably not. Also, there are TONS of hosting sites out there that do nothing but resell hosting service from the one company out in Texas I think it is. Would want to make sure that before you spend the time/money to set up remote backups of an already remote hosting service, that they are not in fact within the same facility. I mean, if you are hosting on HostA, and you backup to HostB, and they both resell hosting from the same facility....

The backup script itself should be on the host that contains the data to backup, and should be then transfer the files over to the other server. To be honest, if your hosting server (the live site) goes down, it don't matter where the script is, you will not get a backup.

-Greg

Hello Greg!
Thank you for your very lovely explanations!
I decide to secure against any lost and while I have money I use backup from lunarPages as mother company and have Santrex.com for backups only. Thank you one more time.