Backups User!!! New Feature?

Maybe I've just missed this before, but I just discovered something in my panel... yall check it out under Manage Users... Backup User! Quoted directly from the panel:

In reply to:
At DreamHost, you may only keep website-related content on your regular users.
You do, however, get one user per account where anything legal may be stored; your Backups User.

This user cannot have any websites pointed to it, nor may you share files via it... it is only to be used as an off-site backup for your personal files.
As such, we keep no backups of files on this account. These are already supposed to be your backups... not your only copy!
(Of course, you should always keep your own copies of all data stored with us.. we make no guarantees!)

Every full DreamHost Hosting plan includes 50GB of backups space!
(Additional usage will be charged at the rate of 10 cents / GB a month: the best backup deal on the net!)

Yep, gotta be a brand new feature... ain't seen a blog post or newsletter about it, ain't even on the features list from the main sign up features page... they just snuck it on in there all ninja like!

Killer! 50 Gigs!

"At DreamHost, you may only keep website-related content on your regular users.
You do, however, get one user per account where anything legal may be stored; your Backups User.

This user cannot have any websites pointed to it, nor may you share files via it... it is only to be used as an off-site backup for your personal files.
As such, we keep no backups of files on this account. These are already supposed to be your backups... not your only copy!
(Of course, you should always keep your own copies of all data stored with us.. we make no guarantees!)

Every full DreamHost Hosting plan includes 50GB of backups space!
(Additional usage will be charged at the rate of 10 cents / GB a month: the best backup deal on the net!)"

-Scott

It seems we can backup everything in DH. MySQL databases, Domains, and now Users!

Not quite, but that's what I thought at first.

DreamHost will let you create *one* "user" strictly for a 50 Gig backup space. It's not web accessible, but I'm not sure if it's AFP or WebDAV or rsync accessible. Just (S)FTP accessible.

-Scott

In reply to:
DreamHost will let you create *one* "user" strictly for a 50 Gig backup space. It's not web accessible, but I'm not sure if it's AFP or WebDAV or rsync accessible. Just (S)FTP accessible.

I suspect rsync support is likely, but I'd be happy with SFTP. WinSCP is fine as an application solution and I'm also considering buying SFTPDrive for a direct drive-access solution for Windows.

Funny note: It's probably going to worry me that this will eat up 10% of my storage limit - a massive increase from my current usage of 2%. smile

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Just saw Michael S say at WHT that it is a compromise with users who want to do backups. We all (that have been here a little while at least) know that DH has had a hard time with folks "abusing" their web space for non web site related backups, so they will start crackin down harder on that, but will GIVE us the 50GB, with a fair's fair cost if we want to use more.

Also said that it would hopefully be discussed in the next newsletter.

As someone who has only ever used their webspace for WEBSITE related files, this is purely a bonus to me, but I would imagine some that have been "abusing", many I would suppose using well more than 50GB, this will feel like a trim back, but in the end, DH ain't a charity... they have to defend their business costs, so tough sh*t I say.

I could not use rsync (via ssh). I suspect because it's a nologin shell account.

-Scott

In reply to:
I could not use rsync (via ssh). I suspect because it's a nologin shell account.

Oh well, that's slightly disappointing, but falls short of tragic. SFTP it is!

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How can I do an automatic backup of all user in this account? Or I must to download all the website (a lot of GB) and upload there??

Dreamhost already backs your site up on their servers anyway. If you want another backup of your site, then it would make more sense to download it to your own computer/DVDs/etc... or to an off-site backup service.

Otherwise, it would be like backing up your hard drive to another folder on that drive. wink

Good point. Or you can think backwards like I do. Create your web site on your system then upload the backup to the website.;)

My website

Hm, I am ALMOST excited about this feature, except for the lack of rsync support. I wonder if there's a way for them to support rsync without making it a login shell.

Support without a login shell:

rssh - http://www.pizzashack.org/rssh/ (not sure how secure, but I like the featureset!)

Also...it'd be really awesome to be able to put a copy of my public key up there so I could throw together a backup script.

There's this (http://www.kangry.com/topics/viewcomment.php?index=18524) on doing rsync over SFTP... not sure if its the best way to do it or not.

My main concern is that my bandwidth (GB/month) is very limited here and uploads are counted so would be looking to transfer as little as possible (hopefully via rsync or some other mechanism).

My main concern about using something like sshfs is that it means that rsync essentially has to download the remote file in order to come up with a diff to send back to the server. Real rsync over ssh is much more bandwidth-friendly, since the server can take care of the rolling checksum which is at the core of the rsync diff protocol.

I still am excited about this feature, but would REALLY love to have rsync (or maybe even unison support: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ ) along with some great tutorials on how to set up/configure backup scripts for various systems.

I would think that offering rsync would reduce bandwidth load. I'm curious why this account doesn't offer a login shell... even a limited one (with sftp, rsync, perhaps wget?)

In the meantime, I guess I'm going to try to figure out the synchronize feature on Transmit...

Absolutely! rsync is the name of the game, or does Dreamhost wants me to transfer the 50GB daily?

does anyone know what is meant by "nor may you share files via it"? I'm curious about using this backup user as a way to backup/synchronize files between a work and home computer. Would this count as "sharing", uploading files at home and downloading them at work, and vice versa?

In reply to:
does anyone know what is meant by "nor may you share files via it"? I'm curious about using this backup user as a way to backup/synchronize files between a work and home computer. Would this count as "sharing", uploading files at home and downloading them at work, and vice versa?

I suspect this verbiage is in there because they're going to allow you to keep copyrighted content in this one user and they obviously can't allow you to share this copyrighted content with anyone else.

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"Also...it'd be really awesome to be able to put a copy of my public key up there so I could throw together a backup script."

I tried this and it works fine.

Larry

I haven't tried the feature yet but it's glad to hear that smile

This is great. I just really hope they add rsync support.

OK, 50GB sounds really very nice. But I'm trying to upload something to my brand new backup account, and it's ridiculously slow: 1.2 - 4kb/sec. I doubt that the problem is at my end, I'm sitting in my office in a major research university with a usually lightning fast connection, at least when I upload things to my DH-hosted website from here.

Anybody else having similar issues?

Further to my previous post, I now get slightly higher, but very variable speeds.

I wonder if that's because the backup server is daisy-chained to the other server behind Josh's laundry bin?

I tried this too and it just hung. I think this is a great feature but I really need rsync to take advantage of it. Does DH read these foura or is there some other way to get the message to them?

In reply to:
I tried this too and it just hung. I think this is a great feature but I really need rsync to take advantage of it. Does DH read these foura or is there some other way to get the message to them?

You can use the suggestion feature in the panel.

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I also noticed extremely slow speeds. I was getting 8kb/sec max. If it's going to be this slow, then rsync will be absolutely necessary.

If someone makes a suggestion in the panel, let us know so that everyone here can vote on it.

In reply to:
I also noticed extremely slow speeds. I was getting 8kb/sec max. If it's going to be this slow, then rsync will be absolutely necessary.

Is that 8kb/sec or 8KB/sec?

I suspect Dreamhost may be working out the loading of the backup servers. It is, after all, a brand new service and they're going to have to figure out how much load each server can take and do some averaging to figure out how much a typical user will upload. Plus they might be using some slightly different infrastructure for these backup servers from their typical web servers. I wonder if they're using the failed disk clusters from the Blingy incident?

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Hah, yes, KB. I can be lazy with caps....

Well, at the moment I'm getting between 75KB/sec. Not exactly fast but exactly comparable to the 75KB/sec I get uploading to my regular server.

I've noticed that these figures do get reduced as the latency on my cable connection goes up - when I'm seeding torrents, for example.

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This suggestion has been added to the suggestion panel( https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=home.sugg& ) by someone.

If you want this feature, please vote it up. Its just 1 credit.

Suggestion title: Allow rsync -e ssh for new Personal Backup Account.

I am waiting for this before I begin my backups.

Binny V A

I've used the following on my local machine to mount the Dreamhost backup:

sshfs -o reconnect,cache_timeout=10000 username@dreamhostserver.com:. /mnt/backup

Then the following to rsync to it:

rsync -rtpvP --inplace /localdir /mnt/backup

Backups User!!! New Feature?