Rsync for website backup in a shared hosting environment
Shared hosting remains the go-to choice for many first-time webmasters. The shared-hosting model, which allows several websites to share the same centrally managed server, lets the customer focus on web matters without getting involved with the details of the underlying OS. But the simplicity of the shared hosting environment also leads to some complications. For instance, although many shared hosts do allow users to connect to the shared server over SSH, hosting vendors typically don't provide root access for shared-hosting customers.
From a backup perspective, this lack of root access makes life a little difficult. Although there is a vibrant market of third-party vendors and managed service providers (MSPs) offering various types of cloud-to-cloud backup and data extraction solutions, many tools are proprietary and are not designed to allow easy replication to an on-site source, such as a user's desktop.
Also, although many popular applications like WordPress have their own backup and recovery plugins, these will obviously not be helpful if your website is not running WordPress – or if it's not running a content management service (CMS) at all.
[...]
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