Mosso’s Cloud Offerings (Cloud Sites, Cloud Servers and Slicehost) allow you to have multiple domains.  Managing backups for these domains is actually pretty simple.  For this example you will need a Windows PC (Mac OS X example coming soon).

You will also need Jungle Disk with an active storage account and SftpDrive ($39.95, but there is a 6 week free demo).

We will assume you have Jungle Disk installed and configured to a storage account.

Install SftpDrive (double click the downloaded file and file the prompts)

Now you need to configure SftpDrive – launch it via Start|Program Files|SftpDrive.  You’ll see this box:

You are going to want to create a new drive, so click on that.

Enter your Cloud  credentials, to include the correct FTP server (found within the Mosso/Slicehost Control Panel).I’m on a secure machine so I have the password remembered.  One important thing here – you need to make sure you use an drive letter that is not already in use on your machine!

Click connect.  If you can’t connect, check your credentials.  Make sure the port is still set to 22.Open Windows Explorer and you should see your account contents appear within the drive letter you selected.  Sweet!  Now you are ready to configure Jungle Disk

In Jungle Disk, click “Automatic Backup” enter a Job Name, and click “Create”.

Click on the Job you just created (it is listed under “Automatic Backup”).You’ll get a dialog box like this one – drill down to the website content folder.Make sure you check your settings – here we want everything backed up, including sub-directories.

You can now set up your automated schedule.  Since only the altered data is copied by Jungle Disk, I run this every 8 hours.

To launch the backup, click “Start Backup” in the Jungle Disk Activity Monitor – you’ll get a drop down window with your job name.  Select that job name and Jungle Disk will collect a list of files, and start the backup.

And that is all there is to it.  A typical Wordpress blog, like this one, took about 15 minutes to back up the first time, and just minutes afterwards.

Of course, now that you have your Cloud account as a drive in Windows you can use anything to back the data up, burn it to DVD, etc.

You can also directly modify files and have them reflected in your site.  But that’s a different tutorial!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Jungle Disk, Mosso, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.