Server backup using Dropbox

Last week-end I received an email from the company that hosts this very own website. Their monitoring detected that there was an issue with my server. 2 hours later they were able to tell me something was wrong with my hard drive. 24 hours after that they explained the procedure to get the hard drive replaced.

I'm using this dedicated server for hosting websites, but also as a backup for some personal data and private repositories. This was too much reponsability for one server. Having it down made me realize my offsite backup was not 100% reliable.

I decided to keep this server for hosting my websites. Havin a dedicated server let me tweak nginx and do deploys with rsync. I'm deploying static websites so the security risk is low.

But now I needed to move my backup somewhere else. This whole experience made me realize I don't want to have to maintain the backup. I want something that "just works™" and where I could push my data. I decided to go with the Dropbox Plus plan as Dropbox a service I'm already using. $10/month for 1To is ok. I'm paying for the peace of mind it will bring me.

It also comes with features I couldn't have done with my dedicated server like a Web UI to browse pictures, or a way to share (and revoke) links with people. It's not the main features I was looking for, but they are great nice to have, still.

Now the question is: how do I move my 400Go+ to Dropbox. I don't even have that much space available on my local computer and downloading it all to re-upload it afterwards would take ages.

I have a rescue access to my server with a way to mount the hard drive and explore it. It's Debian-based, so I can install the Dropbox headless client.

Once installed, I also have to install their python helper and rename it to dropbox. From this tool, I can command Dropbox. I started by excluding all directories from the synchronization. I didn't want this rescure box to download all my current Dropbox.

Then I created a new directory in my Dropbox (through the Web UI), and added inside symbolic links to all the directories I wanted to backup. And it worked. I didn't expect it to work that easily, to be honest. I could see in the Web UI directories being created and all my data being upload. Now all I have to do is wait a couple hours while the backup is happening in the background.

That's the most original way of using Dropbox I ever did.

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