I like Media Temple because they give their users a great balance between control and ease of use.  Their line of dedicated virtual servers are not only priced right—from $50 to $150 per month—they also offer you everything from complete command-line control to a great control panel in the from of the Plesk 8.6 interface.  Today I wanted to highlight how much I love their backup utilities.

Along with their “Snapshot” offerings that allow you to backup images of your entire server configuration—similar to Time Machine in OS X—the Plesk control panel offers a simple way to backup individual domains and even ship those backups off to an FTP location of your choice.

The aptly named “Backup” utility is simple to configure and can even be automated to ship off your backup files once a day, week, or month at a specified time.  You can also set the number of backups you’d like to keep.  So, for example, if you were to set the utility to keep 10 backups of a domain, it would delete the oldest backup upon completing an 11th backup.

Media Temple’s clever backup files contain not only website files, but also your MySQL database(s) and all of your email data, so they’re comprehensive, but also bulky.  That means that finding a place to store these backups can be a bit tricky.  Scheduling a nightly backup to a file server in your business’s server closet might be viable, but only if your connection can handle downloading the content of your site(s) every night.  If you’ve got over 10GB of data on the web and an average business connection, you’d probably be cutting it close.

Thankfully, RackSpace offers a great service that will allow you to backup your files to another location without bogging down your office’s connection.  CloudFiles, RackSpace’s cheaper answer to Amazon’s S3 file storage solution, can serve as a second location for your precious web files without costing you an arm and a leg.  Their easy-to-use pricing calculator will show you quite clearly just how reasonable their prices are.

So, by combining Media Temple’s built-in backup utility with a bit of cloudy goodness from RackSpace, you’ve got yourself a pretty affordable backup solution in case your Media Temple server falls prey to server bunker gremlins.

But just like counting chickens before they’ve hatched, never count your backups before you’ve used them to actually restore a site.  I’d recommend setting up some dummy domains to test your system from backup to transfer to restore before allowing yourself to feel secure about this automated path to peace of mind.

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