After reading Phil Haack’s and Jeff Atwood’s posts on having a catastrophic failure of the hard drive hosting their two blogs, I figured it would be a good time to review the backups I have in place for some of my sites. I have been using Mozy for more than a year now and it has worked really well. The only thing I don’t like is the amount of time it takes to get an entire backup copy of a site and its database from them and onto a new server. Generally I have most of the files around on my local drive ready to go to a new server. My local copy of the database is always out of date though.

Since SQL Express doesn’t have built in scheduled backup, I decided to look for an easy third party solution without a bunch of scripting and user created scheduled tasks. Enter SQLBackupAndFTP. Their service does just what is says. Its dead simple and seams to work as advertised so far. They have a free option that allows you to backup two databases. The paid version of course has more features. The one feature I really wanted though (FTPS) is only in the high end professional version. The peace of mind is worth it though.