Automating server backups

Keeping your servers backed up is an important task, and my philosophy is the only kind of acceptable backup is an automated backup. Otherwise it’s just too easy to let other work get in the way of running that regular backup to safe gaurd your data. At other times in the past I have used dedicated backup servers to automate backups from other machines, but now in the days of cloud computing you can automate backups without dedicated hardware and with less trouble by using a storage service such as S3. For those of you looking to automate your backups similarly check out this howto on automating Linux backups using Duplicity and S3.