Backup and restore

I use MySQL Administrator to do the mysql dump. I was not that concerned with compressing the data. At the end of the year the database was a little more than 1G. I allowed the database to be backed up daily and keep the last week's worth of data using another cron job to find sql backups older than 7 days. I also kept a monthly backup (the one made on the first of the month) and a beginning of year and end of year backup.

For the moodle folders and moodledata, I liked rdiff-backup as it provided me with the greatest flexibility and minimal transfer and ease of total restore. Essentially it does an incremental backup; however, it saves the information so that you can also reconstruct either the entire or a portion of the backup to a particular day. Again I performed these daily as well during off peak hours.

Peace - Anthony