Never trust your data to another company or hardware component. You really need to take matters into your own hand.
rsync sounds cool, I'll check that out in a minute.
Your Eureka post really went into greater detail with the play by play.
Anyway, go look into mysqldump. Most linux servers have that, especially if you have cpanel. Anyway, for the future, setup a cronjob on EVERY site that has databases and have it run mysqldump to a backup folder OUTSIDE of your /public_html folder.
I have mine running daily on sites that have content changing daily. Other sites have it running weeky.
Hell, I even have a cronjob that makes a tarball of my site once a week. I login and download weekly. I store these on my local hard disk and my Seagate external drive (FreeAgent).
mysqldump method for DB backups:
Code:
/usr/bin/mysqldump -hlocalhost -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD DBNAME > /home/xxx/backup/DBNAME.`/bin/date +\%Y\%m\%d`.sql
Would make a file: DBNAME.20080203.sql (today's date)
tarball backup of site files (not DBs)
Code:
tar -cf backup/SITEABREV-`/bin/date +\%m\%d\%y`.tar public_html/
Would make a file: SITEABREV-020308.tar
Contents would be all files under your /public_html/
Just remember to login once a week and download. Or else, you'll start using some serious disk space.
If you have shell, login under shell and run these commands first to make sure there's no errors.
I hope this helps. You guys have helped me a lot, I'm always happy to help where I can.