Restoring a Linode Backup

This article is devoid of insight. The author didn't even do basic research on the topic, because, as already mentioned, the easiest route--creating a temporary linode--isn't covered. Linode's own documentation covers back-ups much better.

The referral code at the bottom was the icing on the cake--and then I noticed the self-submission.

Keep in mind you can restore to a new linode to see how it will function first. That linode is charged on a pro-rated basis, so if you work quickly its only going to be a few cents.

As stated in the linode backup docs, a disk snapshot might catch your DB in the middle of a transaction, so you should dump the DB to disk on a schedule, and then restore the disk followed by restoring the DB from the dump.

It's great that Linode offers the backup system, and for a reasonable price, but I have several Linodes and wanted to be able to restore individual files from different days. Say, for example, if I futzed around with Apache config and ended up rendering it useless, or if I forget the "where" clause in a "delete from".

So we use BackupPC (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/). It's not as easy to set up as Linode's backup -- it requires some configuration, and securing it takes a little bit of effort -- but it's a great solution. With file pooling and compression, I can store months of backups for multiple Linodes on a single other small Linode instance.

I love Linode's control panel and administration system. When I was choosing a virtual solution a few years ago they were by far the best.