More Backup Options

This week, Rdbhost has upgraded its bulk data transfer tools to be able to save the database dump to Amazon's S3 service, and to restore from same.

The additions are found on the Bulk Transfer page, which is in the left-hand menu bar on most membership pages.  There is an S3 configuration page, which askes for the access-key and secret-key, and the name of the bucket to store to.  The transfer to S3 page itself will save to an object named for the account, something like 'rdbhost0000000002' for account 2.  The S3 to rdbhost transfer asks for the object name.

The intended purpose for the tool is safe-keeping of snapshots of your database, for restoration in the case of data loss, but it is also useful for transferring databases quickly from one account to another.

The bulk transfer server uses streaming data flows (for all bulk transfers, not just S3), so no temporary copies of the dump are made anywhere, and the largest databases can be transferred.  The server will open up to five simultaneous transfers to accelerate the data flow to S3, so the S3 backup will presumably be faster than saving to the browser, though we have not measured the improvement.

You do need an Amazon Web Services Account (see aws.amazon.com), before you can use this streaming to S3 service, and you should create a bucket to receive the object.  We only create the object and put the data in it; the bucket must pre-exist. 

https://www.rdbhost.com/bulktransfer.html