I run a few cloud servers at Linode and Digital Ocean which host stuff for clients. Although I have automated backups in place to backup my clients’ data, I always worry about some catastrophic situation where the entire server goes down and, God forbid, needs to be re-built from scratch.
While places like Digital Ocean advertise you can spin up a new Linux server in a matter of seconds — and no doubt you can — what they don’t tell you is how long it takes to configure that server for real-world use. Depending on how many packages, libraries, and other software you need to install, and all the configuration that goes along with it, you could be looking at 2, 3, or even several hours to rebuild a server. To many of my clients that kind of downtime would be absolutely detrimental (and not too good for my business, either).
Continue reading How To Backup Your Entire Server or VPS While It’s Running Using Linux Hot Copy
