My Backup Videos To Date

4 min readJul 19, 2020

I started a YouTube channel recently in order to record and distribute a couple of screencasts.

My motivation in starting the initiative has been to simply contribute some knowledge back to the open source community that has provided me with so much information over the years (knowledge which, in large part, has enabled me to make a living as a technology writer).

It has also been a great opportunity for me to refresh on the basics of video editing and to make use of some of the gear I assembled last year (namely a camcorder, some microphones, and some tripods!)

As I get more into things, I hope to shift away from technology screencasts a little and give the channel a more general flavor with other subjects that are of interest to me (including travel, cooking, and politics).

However, as I happened to start the channel at about the same time as I was revising my backup strategy for the next year (or perhaps two), backups, and especially Linux backups, has emerged as the dominant theme of the channel to date.

As I think that I have just about wrapped up everything I have to say and share about backups (note: I have thought that every week for the past month), I thought I would put together this quick runthrough of all the videos that I have made. If you’re new to the world of backups, or have recently lost data and resolved to take backup more seriously, then some of these videos might be of interest to you.

Cloud to Cloud (C2C) Backups

Although I have some reservations about its security, Multcloud is a well-known and versatile tool for moving data between cloud storage volumes.

In this short video, I demonstrate how to use it for cloud to cloud (C2C) backups.

Need to back up your YouTube account?

Your options include backing up videos before uploading them, of course, as well as using Google Takeouts (I suggest a way to minimize the data upload) and downloading the files after uploading them and letting YouTube compress them.

Backing Up Shared Web Hosting

Shared hosting isn’t the most ideal source to backup, but with a little bit of hackery — and the very versatile and powerful rsync CLI — anything is possible.

In this video I outline how to use rsync to back up both the file system and the MySQL database for typical web applications hosted in a shared or reseller environment.

I provide a bit more detail about execution in this video:

And in this video I cover creating the mysqldump cron job serverside to make sure that the MySQL backup is included in the daily rsync pull.

If you want to add WordPress sites to your backup pool by creating full backups, rather than by running rsync pulls, then this video describes the process.

And full cPanel backups:

Backing Up SaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the one aspect that many people forget to include in their backup strategy. There are many reasons why SaaS data is vulnerable unless backed up — some of those include accidental deletion (human/programmatic), account lockout, and, of course, the theoretical risk that the provider will simply vanish without trace.

Here’s a quick way to back up your Github repositories.

Ubuntu Linux Backups

As a longtime Ubuntu Linux user, a good backup strategy has made all the difference for me between tearing my hair out while getting stuck in an endless loop of periodic reinstallations and actually feel like I’m moving ahead, linearly, with the operating system.

In “My Ubuntu desktop backup strategy — V1.3” I outline everything I am currently doing to keep the system well-protected, including creating onsite backup points using both Clonezilla and Timeshift.

For bare metal backups I use the excellent Clonezilla tool. Here’s a quick demonstration of how to run it on a live system to create a disk image backup.

But every good backup and DR strategy involves testing your backups!

Here’s a real (bare metal) demonstration restore from a Clonezilla backup image that I successfully undertook recently.

Of course, the famous 3–2–1 rule calls for one offsite copy of the filesystem to be taken to.

In this video, I demonstrated creating an offsite backup of the Linux primary using MSP360 (formerly Cloudberry Labs).

Synology NAS Backups

I was recently sent a Synology NAS for evaluation. This provided a great opportunity to switch over my desktop backup strategy from one based on keeping a few extra internal drives to backing everything up to the network attached storage (NAS).

Here’s how to use the basic grsync (rsync GUI) to back up a live Linux filesystem onto a Synology NAS:

I think that Cloudberry is a bit more user-friendly and powerful. In this video I described how to get that backup job from a local desktop to the NAS running using it instead of grsync.

Here’s how to run bare metal / disk imaging backups from your computer (OS-agnostic) onto a Synology NAS / local server.

Setting up Active Backup for Gsuite requires following a few steps. Here they are.

You can also save and execute Bash scripts on the NAS.

Here’s how to do that.