PHP

A few weeks ago we decided to switch on hourly backups on SambaJAM and I went in search of some good automation scripts to do this...I was very disappointed.

Like a lot of new start-ups, we've been taking advantage of Amazon Web Services to host our servers and data, and if you're building stuff in the cloud it is a great service to use. The problem is they still haven't implemented an easy way to do revolving backups if you're storing data on Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes. By revolving backups I basically mean I keep a certain period of backups (say 2 weeks) and any backups older than that get deleted/overwritten to ensure I stay within AWS's 500 snapshot limit and only keep what I need to recover data in a disaster recovery scenario. Right now AWS provide EC2 command line tools to create snapshots of your volumes but it doesn't have any way of deleting snapshots automatically so I can only keep the last 400 snapshots, and delete any that are older.