Guys, I love the backup SQL Server capability you add a few months ago. But it is a pain to use because it's manual. Please give us a way to automate it! I'm sick of using SQLBackupAndFTP and other hacks to do this. A simple solution would be map the E:\{website} to the SQL Server, so we can kick it off using BACKUP DATABASE and send the data TO E:\{website} from where it can be downloaded. Overall, love the service! Thanks for all that you guys do.
Well, you cannot initiate the backup directly from the SQL server with your DB login. This will require your DB login has system admin rights to the SQL server and of course this will compromise the security of the other databases we host. I'll make sure I pass on your request during our weekly company meeting.
Sorry, although your request has been noted we had to prioritize our projects and resources. Right now our main focus was creating and now supporting a Winhost affiliate program. http://support.Winhost.com/KB/c212/affiliate-program.aspx
Hi Ray. I really love your service, however, I am also looking for (daily) automatic DB backups. Is there anything in progress since the affiliate program is already in place? Thank you!
At this time we do not have any plans where we can offer an automated backup solution for our customers. But I will make sure to bring it up in our weekly meetings.
I too want to reiterate that I love the services you guys provide! I would like to join with those who have already mentioned that an automated backup would be wonderful. If you do decide to tackle this issue, could set it up as mother-daughter backup (7 daily backups that rotate Sunday-Saturday and then a weekly backup). That would be fantastic! Even better than fantastic!
Automated Backup Just like to add my vote to automated backups, so far this is the only brick wall I have hit with Winhost, other than that great service and support. Matt
This is something we'd really like to see as well. The only viable approach now is to run a script and automate a browser, but that means leaving our password in a configuration file, and of course it's brittle if you change the structure of the CP site.
Would you still want them if they were dropped into your home directory and counted against your space quota? Just checking, since that's pretty much the status quo with things like cpanel, but I don't know if it's desirable for everyone. The problem is - as it often is - the amount of space necessary to store and retain x number of database backups for thousands of databases. It's replication for us since we already backup databases and store a few days worth of those. Any time we store two of anything, it is generally not a smart use of resources. But I know it's on the request list, so it's just a matter of the product guys determining when the demand is sufficient to devote the development time to it. That's the way we evaluate and implement every change or addition we do.
I'd be happy to give up that disk space on my site. Even if you only ever kept a single backup file that was overwritten each time, I could schedule a job to download the file via FTP each day (and hope that it didn't overlap with it being replaced!). Also, the first thing I do when I download the backup file is to compress it. Even with a fast compression algorithm, the file size is greatly reduced. I know this would cost your servers in terms of CPU, but it would reduce disk usage (and IO if you could somehow compress on the fly) and network IO from automated downloads.
Hi. I'm a new customer and I'd like to add my vote for automated database backups. Alternatively, could you consider making the manual backup function accessible via a web service or something that could be easily automated?
We really need a way to automate the backup of our SQL databases! There has go to be an alternative that is relatively easy to implement and that will meet our needs. Please consider making this a priority. An automated backup is an essential tool which I can't do without.
I can understand that automating the backup of the SQL Server is difficult so my question is: are the databases backed up daily ? What's happening if you have a serious issue on the server say a faulty disk drive ? I know it's not common but it happens, one of my other provider just had an issue last Saturday with their email server and they had to restore data from backup. So in case of serious issue on the server are you guys able to restore from a backup any information, meaning website, emails and database ?
I understand your concerns with server failures and I want to assure you that all of the websites and databases we host are backed up every night around 1 a.m. pacific time. But as you pointed out, this is for our own usage in case of server failure. We can retrieve the backup we take upon customers request but since it requires Administrative actions a $30 administrative will be charged to the account. Now, Emails are a bit different. The entire email server is backed up as a whole, not by individual Inboxes. We host a lot of email accounts and emails are constantly changing (Sending/Receiving emails) we cannot retrieve a single email account upon individual request. We can only restore the entire email server.
@Ray: Thanks for your answer. As long as backups are performed daily I can live with that. I also can live with the fact to pay $30 in case I need a restore for a particular website. I reckon the fee you're charging for hosting is pretty low so I suppose a client can't expect having all bells and whistles compared to services charging x times more than you do.
The current backup mechanism is almost there! We just need a way to trigger a backup programatically or have ability to schedule backups in control panel. After that the backup could be downloaded via ftp from /app_data/
