Auto Backup Solution

Ozz · September 2012

There are many ways and tools to auto backup your projects. One solution is to make use of a zip-tool like 7zip or WinRar along with the scheduler of Windows. The benefit of that is that you get very small and compressed backup files but it will take a good amount of your RAM and CPU when compressing your project files.

As this isn't the perfect solution for most users (with VPS) I like to do a backup with a tool called Everyday Auto Backup.

This tool just copies your project files from "...\AppData\Roaming\GSA Search Engine Ranker\projects" to your backup destination folder on a scheduled task you have to determine. I create a backup folder for daily (...\backup\daily) and one for weekly backups (...\backup\weekly).

I'm pretty sure that there are better solutions but this works fine for me as long as SER don't have a backup tool implemented. CPU usage was at 2% with 11 mb RAM when backup my files, but you should definitely stop SER first when testing this tool. You should also make sure that you have enough disk space available as the project folders can be very large.

s4nt0s · September 2012

Awesome. That's a good share for anyone who wants to automated the backup process. Hopefully in time Sven will have an automated solution for this. Losing project files sucks

(

Bytefaker · September 2012

Why do you don't use Dropbox or Wuala S4nt0s? It's a simple solution and Sven has time for other stuff

s4nt0s · September 2012

I don't use any of them really. I just think a auto backup solution would be good. lol I know all about the time and I wouldn't mind if its added a year from now, I just think it would be something nice to have at some point.

jonathanjon · October 2012

Btw, has anyone lost project files? Does this happen often? I haven't experienced that, but I'm figuring out how to backup just in case. But is this something common and what would trigger us losing our files?

Ozz · October 2012

Happend to me in the early days but not in a while (+6 month ago) and as there aren't complaints anywhere I don't think that this happens anywhere. There is always a possibility of data loss because of a broken hard disk though.

I don't use this right now, but it ran flawless and fast on my machine as it only copied modified files to the backup directory.

And I just came up with this solution because there were some people asking about an autobackup for SER. I like to try to figure things out by myself, you need to know

DavidA2 · October 2012

It is always a good suggestion to backup! And he backup needs to be on a drive different than where your data is stored! Having worked with computers for over 20 years, I cannot tell you the number of times that I have had friends (and businesses) lose data. You should be backing up everything. If you are not, you are just asking for trouble. YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL FAIL SOME TIME! Count on it. And if it is not backed up, you will lose everything. I had one friend that owned a construction company. His hard drive failed, and he didn't have anything backed up. He lost EVERYTHING...his accounting records, his tax records, his job records!

I tried the program out that Ozz mentioned. It is good. I have used another one called "Backup Maker". They have a paid & free version. The free version is fine. It is a little more advanced. It will compress (zip) the backups, and it will keep several past versions of the backups (you tell it how many).

http://download.cnet.com/BackUp-Maker/3000-2242_4-10209877.html

Ozz · October 2012

@DavidA2: I tried some autozip-backup-tools as well. You even can use 7zip + windows scheduler for this, but the problem is that it can take a lot of memory and cpu when compressing all files.

Because of that I suggested only to copy the project files. Hard disk space is mostly no problem for all that are using SER on a VPS, but RAM and CPU are.

@all: Dropbox or some other "cloud-disk" service should work as backup directory.

DavidA2 · October 2012

@Ozz: Yeah...the program can take some overhead (and time). If you are only backing up SER files, this is probably not a big deal and either type of program would work fine.

My suggestions were more from the perspective that people really need to be looking for a solution to back up all their data. From experience, most people don't do it. And what would happen if you lost all your documents, pictures, music downloads, etc, etc?

Sure, it is important to backup SER files, but it should be just a part of your overall backup strategy.