Backing up customer game files

[krazos]

Hi!

 

I have a question how you guys do backups of game servers for your customers.

 

Initially i was thinking rsync incremental but each full backup will be very big and each restore more complex since i need to restore files from multiple backups (full+incremental diff). And it wont work on windows.

 

Ideally the backup should run every 3 hours or so.

 

The solution im working on to solve this is a python program that does the following:

1. Query the tcadmin database to get running servers on the machine in question, location of the master files and other file paths

2. Diff the customer files with the master (shallow on some to avoid byte comparison on large files)

3. Only save the diff files to an external backup server

4. Email result

 

So this gives me:

+ full backup (single restore) of all customer modified or edited game server files. (Re-deploy and re-apply backed up files)

+ Low space requirement since customers dont usually add that many large files

+ Low transfer times for both backup and restore

+ Works on both linux and windows

- Not everything is backed up so incompatibility between backed up files and current server files may occur

 

But this is just my ide on how to do this. How do the rest of you out there do it?