Data Backup

Backup is a core part of any digital security or hosting strategy. One of the most common causes of data loss, above hacking or malicious attack, remains accidental loss or loss through uncontrollable situations such as hardware or software failure.

Many hosting providers will provide backup mechanisms as part of a package but this should be confirmed. It will often incur an additional cost and should be considered as an aspect of the providers reputation.

Basic/Shared Hosting

In this scenario access to the server is restricted to Secure FTP(SFTP) and interfaces, such as CPanel.

• Backups of all site content and data should be taken on a regularly scheduled basis.
• This data should be treated appropriately and stored either on a local backup disk in an encrypted volume or on a separate server also using an encrypted disk

Dedicated/VPS Hosting

There are a number of tools available for scheduled secure backup of site content and data where the user has access to the server directly.

These include Rsync, Bacula and | Backup Ninja, for this guide we are going to recommend Backup Ninja as it allows incremental backups encrypted using GPG. Additionally, it allows for differential backups - meaning that only changed data is updated reducing the time and foot print of each backup.

Example configs

When using Backup Ninja and Duplicity restoring encrypted backups from a remote source is as simple as running

duplicity restore \
--scp-command 'scp -o IdentityFile=/home/phaidros/.ssh/id_rsa_duplicity' \ 
--sftp-command 'sftp -o IdentityFile=/home/phaidros/.ssh/id_rsa_duplicity' \
--file-to-restore path/to/folder scp://user@host.mybackup.de/path/to/backup/ \
localfolderforrestoredfile