David Ehlers

These two open source scripts are very useful when combined with cron:

s3 Tools : http://sourceforge.net/projects/s3tools/

OpenSource tools to access Amazon S3 file storage. s3cmd - unix-like tools to manipulate stored files from the command line, s3fuse - driver to mount the S3 storage locally.

and

automysqlbackup : http://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/

A script to take daily, weekly and monthly backups of your MySQL databases using mysqldump. Features - Backup mutiple databases - Single backup file or to a seperate file for each DB - Compress backup files - Backup remote servers

I’m currently evaluating this service, after using some of the other amazon services such as s3, this looks super sexy in a techy way. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.  Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios

Heck, create a drupal site on EC2 with a single line: ec2-run-instances ami-4c7b9e25 -k gsg-keypair

and for us Mac OSX users, here’s a getting started on ec2

Amazon’s Getting Started Guide

A quick way to archive a complete site via a shell:

wget -r http://yourwebsite.com

Here’s the man page.

GNU Wget 1.9, a non-interactive network retriever: Usage: wget [OPTION]… [URL]..