Chris Hutchins

All Dreamhost hosting accounts now come with 50gb of free personal backup.I’ve been searching for a while on a good tutorial for this and couldn’t find one, so I thought I would make my own.

1. Setup passwordless login for rsync (can be skipped if you don’t mind typing your password each time you want to sync)

• Open terminal and type the following (press return after each line)
• “ssh-keygen -t dsa” (press enter after all three prompts)
• “scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub remote”
• “cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys”
• “chmod 644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys”
• “sftp backupusername@backup.dreamhost.com”
• “lcd /Users/OSXUsername/.ssh
• “mkdir .ssh”
• “put authorized_keys .ssh”

2. Sync your files / folders

• Open terminal and type the following, then press return
• “rsync -avz BackupFolder backupusername@backup.dreamhost.com:DestinationFolder” (example: “rsync -avz ~/Documents bxxxxxx@backup.dreamhost.com:macbook_backup”)
• Optionally, you can add “–delete” after “-avz” (ie: “-avz –delete “) if you want to delete files on your backup once they’ve been deleted locally

3. Automate the backup process

• Still working on this, check back later or leave some advice in the comments. Thanks!

Sources of information:

Michael Twomey - http://blogs.translucentcode.org/mick/archives/000230.html
Marc Climent - http://codelog.climens.net/2008/12/03/using-dreamhost-backup-account-with-rsync/