[onion2k]

Why would you back up the server?

In case of things like this. Also it's usually quicker to recover a server using an image than it would be to provision from source in the case of, say, a hardware failure.

What would you do when you had 100 servers?

Something more scalable. There's no reason why you should pick an approach to solving a problem and stick with it forever. If the situation changes you do something more appropriate. That doesn't mean the small scale approach is wrong when the scale is small.

[ianmobbs]

I mean, the better way of doing this is just keep your application code stateless and make frequent backups of your data stores. If the developers knew they had server code that wasn't checked into SVN, your solution makes more sense, but they just had no idea. Even in corporate, if I need to set up a new box for a service, I don't backup an image from another box and deploy it to the new one - I just pull my Docker image and run that.

[cwyers]

Yes, but part of keeping your application code stateless is that you need to actually do things to keep it that way. If you haven't done those things, it's easier to set up Tarsnap in a cron job than it is to make sure your deployment process is stateless.

[AmericanChopper]

If you have a service you haven’t built in 5 years, then I’d say you have a lot more important problems than server backups.