Turkish Hackers and backup options

With all the talk about Turkish Hackers, I decided to work on an inexpensive system to perform automatic backups and change notification. I've been using a program called WebAgain from Lockstep that is very good at maintaining a backup of my hosted site on my office computer and then comparing the current site to the backup. The only problem with it is the cost; $995 USD! Not something most of us are willing cough up considering the fact that $995 would pay for most of our hosting services for a decade.

Well, in my research prior to jumping into this, I stumbled across an interesting little program called SiteShelter from Remote Backup Systems. It's almost a functional equivalent to WebAgain, but sells for only $49 dollars! I've only had it for a day and while the tests have gone well, I'm not ready to completely abandon my personal project. I was planning to offer my program for free with no support, but at 50 bucks for a much more fully developed program, my project is probably dead. From what I have seen so far, I highly recommend this program.

First of all, it has 4 operating modes, one of which is a "Repair" mode. In this mode, if it detects any file changes or deletions, SiteShelter will revert the change and quarantine the modified file. One glaring difference between WebAgain and SiteShelter though is what they each do with NEW files. Whereas SiteShelter seems to merely note the new file and notify the Admin, WebAgain will actually remove the new file and also offers you a very easy means to make that new file part of the authorized "image", for lack of a better term.

You can have multiple processes scheduled, and this is what I'm testing now: a daily "backup" keeping the last 10 versions, and then a simple "watch" every 15 minutes that will notify me if anything changes compared to the most recent backup. The "repair" mode did detect a simple change to an image file and reverted the change after downloading and quarantining the modified file. Use "mirror" mode at your own risk. Don't touch it unless you really understand the warnings they popup.

This program seems to be just what many of us have needed. Did mention that WebAgain is $995 PER web site?!

 Yes, thank you!!