Question

Should I do my own database backup in addition to the DO's automatic backup?

Posted October 12, 2014 2.5k views

I run a small LAMP stack application, and I would like periodically back-up my database in case the physical machines hosting my droplet goes down.

If I enabled the automatic backup provided by DO, should I run my own daily backup utilities in addition to that? My current thinking is like this:
1) even I run my own backup utilities (e.g., mysqldump etc), I probably run it nightly every 24 hours, so I have not seen the additional benefit than relying on the daily automatic backup offered by DO
2) on the other hand, I heard ppl saying ‘you must run your own backup to avoid putting all the eggs into one basket’

Any comment and suggestion on this?

Thanks,
Sean

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seany
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seany

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2 answers
Woet October 12, 2014

Yes.

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  • seany October 12, 2014

    Can you elaborate a bit more, after give a simple ‘yes’?

    Thanks,

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  • Woet October 12, 2014

    Backups you rely on for disaster recovery should always be off-site. Backups offered by the one and the same provider can be useful but you can not rely on them.

    Hypothetical scenarios where you will lose them:

    • Provider gets hacked, vms and backups are wiped
    • Provider goes bankrupt and equipment goes offline
    • Provider suspends your account permanently
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Zachary_DuBois October 12, 2014

Yeah, I’d highly recommend it. Because even with the DigitalOcean live backups, it could catch MariaDB or whatever DB engine mid updating, etc and you would still have a corrupted table/etc from the backup. Running a mysql-dump on a Cronjob should do the trick. Then DigitalOcean will back that up.

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