using a dedicated server on a hosting site
 

I am running a dedicated server on a hosting site. It doesnt seem like the provider has native options to back up my server if i need to transfer it or recover it. Any recommendations on doing this?

any recommendations on service providers that have dedicated servers? Not really interested in AWS/IBM - too expensive. plus, aws seems more complicated then it needs to be (it might just be me).

You should already be backing up your content to somewhere "off prem" already, and practice building / configuring as necessary.

Regarding hosting providers for dedicated servers, you don't specify whether you're looking for a VPS or dedicated metal.

My production sites are on dedicated metal from OVH and in the past I've used dedicated metal from Serverloft, who are now part of velia.net (who are apparently part of GoDaddy)

I have rsync scripts that backup everything to my house. I would never trust having backups that are online only but having both is always good. On the dedicated server I have local backups that backup to local folders, then reset permissions to a "backup" user. Then the rsync job that runs from my house runs through SSH as that user and syncs all the data to the local backup folder. I then have a rotation of removable drives that backup my home environment as a whole and includes the online backups too.

No matter what other backup solutions you have you should always also have one that backs up locally as you never know when something may happen to your host along with your backups.

Same here, I make use of DIRVISH as a "wrapper" around rsync so that I've multiple point in time backups. A Raspberry Pi with an iSCSI connection to my NAS handles the storage part of it quite nicely.

I second the recommendation for rsync. An advantage it has is that it only transfers the differences, that will save on time and bandwidth caps if any. So you and your team can use removable drives for that. You can even use it for incremental backups, see the --link-dest option.

Remember that the data has to be offline to be a backup. Therefore be sure to use more than one drive because during the time it is plugged in it is a copy and not a backup. Also, for the backup drives, give consideration to using an encryped file system. That makes erasure as simple as forgetting the key or passphrase.

If you are looking for commercial options, then Tarsnap can be considered. But again the data does have to be offline to be considered a backup and not merely a copy.

Online backups are ok, but yes you should have offline ones too. I personally use both. The online ones are basically a mirror, though some use date paths (kinda crude but I just plug parts of the date in the destination folder). Then I got removable ones I run once in a while.

My hosting provider includes access to cPanel.

Since my website is a blog, I use cPanel's phpMyAdmin to export my database to my local computer on a weekly basis (I also check, repair, and optimize it every week), then I copy the exported *.sql file to another location, because there's no such thing as too many backups.

On a less frequent basis, I use cPanel's "Backup Wizard" to make a complete backup, which I then download and store in two separate places.

It is not a "best practice" to store website backups on said website (indeed, some hosting providers' terms of service are less than favorable to doing so). If the website goes kerflooey, it will take the backups with it.

And just to prove that you really do need off-site backups:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ed-4175692107/