Backups are boring right up until the moment you need one. Then they become the most interesting thing in the world. I've watched people lose projects, configs, entire server setups because they assumed the cloud would just... remember. It doesn't. The cloud is someone else's computer, and someone else's computer has its own problems.
The good news is that automated backups are a solved problem. Rsync and cron have been doing this reliably since before most current developers were born. They don't need a subscription. They don't need a dashboard. They just run, quietly, on a schedule, and copy your files to wherever you tell them to.
Rsync copies files. It's smart about it, too. It only transfers what's changed, so after the first sync, updates are fast even over slow connections. Install it if it's not already there:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install rsyncPick somewhere to put your backups and tell rsync to do its thing:
mkdir -p /path/to/backup-directory
rsync -avz /var/www/html/ /path/to/backup-directory/That backs up your web root locally. If your server dies and takes the backup with it, though, you haven't really solved anything. For that you want remote backups.
Set up an SSH key so rsync can connect without asking for a password:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -f ~/.ssh/backup_key
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/backup_key.pub user@remote-serverThen rsync over SSH:
rsync -avz -e "ssh -i /path/to/backup_key" /var/www/html/ user@backup-server:/path/to/backup-directory/Now your files exist in two places. One of them can catch fire and you're still fine. That's the whole point of backups, and it's frankly alarming how many people skip this step.
Cron runs things on a schedule. Open it up:
crontab -eAdd a line to run the backup every night at midnight:
0 0 * * * rsync -avz /var/www/html/ /path/to/backup-directory/That's it. Every night, your files get synced. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to remember. The computer remembers for you. That's literally what computers are for.
Restoring is just rsync in the other direction:
rsync -avz /path/to/backup-directory/ /var/www/html/No recovery wizard. No support ticket. No "please upgrade to restore from backups." Just files going back to where they belong. Tools that have been doing exactly this for decades, on every Unix system ever built, for free. Sometimes boring technology is the best technology.