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by kumaraman 3544 days ago
I use AWS S3 for this as the storage prices are so cheap, at $0.03 per GB. I recommend using a utility called s3cmd, which is a similar to rsync, in that you can backup directories. I just have this setup with a batch of cron jobs which dump my databases and then sync the directories to s3 weekly.
3 comments

I use duply (a simpler CLI front-end to duplicity) for doing encrypted incremental backups to S3.

The only annoying thing is that duplicity uses an old version of the boto s3 library that errors out if your signatures tar file is greater than 5gb unless you add `DUPL_PARAMS="$DUPL_PARAMS --s3-use-multiprocessing "` to your duply `conf` file. Took me days to figure that out.

Duplicity is great! I use duply to back up my photos to Backblaze B2, which is really cheap: 0.005$/GB/Month.
I host many sites for clients, and use the same approach. Our VPS host offers Plesk (which we use) and it creates a backup every day (basically ZIPs up non-system directories and runs mysqldump / pg_dumps on the databases)... then I wrote a simple bash script which sends the zipped backup to an S3 bucket using s3cmd.

It took a little time to set up, but it is conceptually simple, very inexpensive (especially if you set up S3 to automatically send older files to Glacier, and/or remove old backups every now and then)... and I like that the backups are off-site and stored by a different company than the web hosts.

Agree, s3cmd is simple and effective. I have written bash scripts to regularly take db dump and put it on S3. Same can be done for folders.
Also you can configure s3 buckets to delete files older than X days. For non critical projects I tend to set this at 30 days. This way the total storage used by the backups doesn't grow beyond a certain limit and helps you to control the spending.

Here are the relevant docs: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/object-lifecy...