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Friendly reminder: test restoring from that, regularly. After your hard drive crashes is a bad time to learn that, e.g., zipping up a folder of MySQL files is not exactly backup best practice.

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I'd expand this to actually take the time to implement (or make yourself) a system to automate said backups and maybe even testing them automagically. You'll probably end up using the same set of scripts for all your beginning projects and it'll be worth having.

Don't forget to check logs to make sure your automation actually works.

Periodically make full restore from bare metal or fresh VPS image using your backups and following written procedure.

Make corrections if something does not work as expected.

Thanks, great advice :) Right now I'm taking backups of dumps - slow, but a tiny bit easier to deal with. At some point I'm thinking about replicating to a slave somewhere, although to be honest I need to do some more reading about best practises.

Yes. Obviously, specifics will be dependent upon your exact situation, but it would be nice to have a small road-map for backups. I occasionally take my database dumps and fire up postgres on the home server and make sure I can restore the database. That's about as far as I take it usually. Probably not a robust failsafe, but it's what I do now.

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