Backup-issues
January 27, 2008
Well, some of you might remember October 16th and the backup scheme I installed following that dreadful day. I set up cronjobs and mailed the zipfiles to a Gmail account. Pretty slick and I was quite happy with it.
That was right up until the day Gmail started bouncing my mails. After an investigation it seems Gmail flagged my zipfiles as a virus. The reason: a high compression rate and somehow that is considered to be related to a virus.
So last night it got me thinking. I had a fairly decent zip-class, perhaps I could throw in a mailer-class and a database backup class (written for my old CMS). That way I could build my own backup software and drop the other script that was sending unaccepted zip-files.
Well, today was the day of the initial tries and after some startup errors (paths are really different when started as a cronjob) all seems to be working well. The size is only 120KB while the other script was a mere 2000KB. So that is a drop of a whopping 94% in size.
Now I can clean some things up and install it on all my subdomains. 
Now for a question to the readers of this blog: What would you consider to be a good backup scheme? Every 56 hours? (That would make it three times a week: 7 days times 24 hours equals 168 hours in a week. 168 hours divided by three would make it every 56 hours). Let me know alright? 
Sure, you could do every 56 hours... that sounds reasonable. But
Jay | January 27, 2008Sure, you could do every 56 hours… that sounds reasonable.
But I’m at a loss to why you’re having such issues with G-Mail.
Perhaps it’s time to switch to another hosting provider, such as Amazon S3.
That way you won’t have any issues with your zip files being flagged as a “virus”.
And thanks to Amazon’s pay as you go system, it would only cost you a few cents per month, and it’s very unlikely that Amazon is going to disappear over night.
Jay, basically I was having issues with Gmail because of
Dennis | January 30, 2008Jay, basically I was having issues with Gmail because of the way they handled my zipfiles. In the previous backup script there was a working zip class, but not according to the standards. Gmail checks the zip against these standards and rejects the mail.
My current setup does obey the standards, so Gmail is accepting them without a hitch.
In the end I decided to do a full backup twice a week. That sounds reasonable since, if something happens I will only lose three days (which is acceptable based upon the current comment rate)