Automatic File backup to Amazon S3

[Leemy]

My SMF forum w/ attachments is about 7 gigs so I recently got a 40gig VPS. I was very surprised that with 1 full backup on the server, im currently at 85% usage! (34 gigs used).  So I am thinking instead of on-server file backups, it would be nice (and more failure-proof) to have an automatic backup to Amazon S3

I saw some articles on it but that's from a home server.  Anyone have experience backing up their SMF files or DB to Amazon? Idiot-proof instructions would be nice

FYI - You can use this calculator to estimate your S3 costs

From the links, I'm trying to open this up to discussion of the concept in general 

[H]

You can do rsync to S3 which should make s3 similar to any other rsync backup . Then you'd just need to do a database dump and send that too

[Leemy]

Thank you H for the referral to rsync.  Does anyone have documentation to make this painless for a novice to server administration?

[Leemy]

Question: Will I be able to get rid of the 14G backup folder on my server when I set up S3 backup or will I really be sending my backup folder to S3? Because the whole point of this is to get rid of the 14G backup folder so I have a good amount of space on my server again.  Otherwise it seems I will be out of space within a few weeks!

[H]

I don't have any rsync tutorials to recommend unfortunately. There are quite a few out there though as well as the man page . You should be able to rsync your forum directory, which will allow you to delete your backup directory

[青山 素子]

If you can install some software on the S3 side, I recommend using Dirvish. There are some good tutorials out there (a three part series all about the tool ran in SysAdmin magazine - website has electronic copies), it uses rsync, and it works off incremental backups, which will save you space on backup storage.

[Leemy]

I'm bringing this topic up again.  I heard about s3sync, which is better than rsync since rsync is now out of development.  Anyone have any experience with this? Again, anything to make this as painless as possible for a n00b to server management?

[青山 素子]

You might want to look at JungleDisk, specifically their server edition. It works with both Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloudfiles.

[Leemy]

I've set up backup-manager.com on the site (instead of s3sync) because it handles full + incremental backups. will let you know how it works out!

[Oldiesmann]

Do you still need help with this Leemy?