Stone Studio

Please note that backing up personal files to their servers is against their terms of service (UNLIMITED Hosting Space not disk space), so if they catch you they will probably delete all your files and suspend your account!

First of all you have to enable the SSH access in the control panel which Bluehost provided.

First I enabled SSH access. Then I enabled public-key authentication (How To) on my wei-jiang.com account. When that was done I used a script found on the internet.  and I placed it on to my server:

# This script does personal backups to a rsync backup server.

# directory to backup
BDIR=/volume1/photo/

# excludes file - this contains a wildcard pattern per line of files to exclude
EXCLUDES=/volume1/NetBackup/backup.exclude

# the name of the backup machine
BSERVER=YOUR_USERNAME@YOUR_IP

TODAY=`date '+%Y-%m-%d'`

# remote directory where we would like to backup our data to
RBDIR=/BACKUP

#####################################

#####################################

OPTS="--force --ignore-errors --delete-excluded --exclude-from=$EXCLUDES
--delete --backup --backup-dir=/$BACKUPDIR -avz"

# now the actual transfer
rsync $OPTS $BDIR $BSERVER:$RBDIR/current

ssh $BSERVER 'touch /BACKUP/current ; cp -al /BACKUP/current/* /BACKUP/`date '+%Y-%m-%d'` ; exit';

As you can see this is a small script that creates for every day a new subdir on your /BACKUP directory. Also at any time you can find the latest backup in  the following directory : /BACKUP/current

And If you may wonder about the last step :

ssh $BSERVER 'touch /BACKUP/current ; cp -al /BACKUP/current/* /BACKUP/`date '+%Y-%m-%d'` ; exit';

Here is some more info about it :

I create a remote ssh connection to wijndaele.com (ssh YOUR_USERNAME@YOUR_IP)

I touch /BACKUP/current , that way I know when the last sync took place

cp -al /BACKUP/current/* /BACKUP/`date ‘+%Y-%m-%d’`: I create a hard link from all the files in /BACKUP/current/* to the Dir of that day (eg /BACKUP/2008-08-04)

When all that is done, I simply close the remote connection!

Reference:

• rsync web pages
• Source from wijndaele