Cheap remote backup solution

After reading the madness of what happened to Phil Haack a few weeks ago and a few other people who had VPS’ running on the same machine after a physical hard drive failure everyone on the box (so it seemed) realised that they didn’t have much, if any, backup solution in place. This got me thinking …

There are a number of remote backup solutions for remote servers but they cost money which at the current time I don’t have, and most people don’t have due to the current economical climate. So was checking my email the other day and scrolled to the bottom of the page and noticed that I was only using a small amount of the my gmail account storage. It got me thinking that there was a plug in you could get to use your gmail account a remote storage / mapped network drive. This could be the reliable backup solution I’m looking for.

After doing a bit of Googling about to see if there was anything out there before I set down to write my own solution to this problem I found backup2Gmail on Code Project. Once I realised that you could run this from a command line then I was on to a winner.

So the backup bat file goes along the lines of:

Backup the svn respository using svnadmin to a backup folder (c:\backup\svn)

Checkout the latest code from the repository to a folder in the backup folder (c:\backup\code)

Run the backup 2 gmail command line to backup the c:\backup folder. It then zips it up and sends it to my account.

And that’s it. Put all that into a bat file, put some error checking in to make sure the dirs which are required are there at the beginner, removed at the end etc. and then set it as a scheduled task for some crazy time early in the day (currently set at 3am).

Hope this helps someone else in the future to avoid the heart ache of server failure.