The recent sudden closure of hosting providers shows a backup on the same
server as your Moodle install may prove to be useless. But how to copy your backups off site?
One way is to use a home computer- but it must be running at backup time, usually early morning. A good job for a Pi or an obsolete laptop running Linux and rsync. You could use another cloud server - but when 20 providers shut up shop at one time you need to pick carefully. But why not use Dropbox? It has 2 gB free and is well known enough to be unlikely to disappear overnight.
I am attaching a script I have been using for the last few weeks on a Linux VPS. I hope I have commented the code enough. It also requires a program called dropbox_uploader.sh and directions for installation are here on
AddictiveTips . The idea is to find the course backup by adding today's date into a string, create a
database backup with a concatenated date, and then
upload both to Dropbox. The count gives the files from the specified number of days ago and deletes them from Dropbox to conserve space. Running at midnight from cron, it stores the three most recent dumps and course backups off site.
I am working on a better description of how it works but I hope it looks useful. The file has been renamed from a .sh to a .txt file.