I have one client with a physical server, backing up primarily to a local USB drive using Windows Server Backup but also with secondary cloud backup to CrashPlan.

The local WSB backup is nice in some ways. It can do block level incremental backups so once the first backup is done a typical daily backup doesn't have that much to do.

CrashPlan also uses some sort of delta technology to minimize use of bandwidth to their cloud backend. However, it does periodic scans of the backup selections which might be costly from an IO standpoint. Dunno how that would compare to, say, ZIPping up all of the backup selections and then firing off the zip file to storage somewhere else. Have you considered anything like CrashPlan?

>I'm running a local copy of SQL Server. My store, blog and parts of the message board plus a couple of customer applications all run through that, but there's not a huge amount of data on it.
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>The key is making sure it gets backed up regularly. I run nightly local backups to folder on the main drive, then pack up everything into a Zip file and ship it off to Azure Storage for backup - this is a 2gb zipped file so it takes a while to pack and takes a bit of CPU while it's doing it in the middle of the night. Low priority 7Zip works well for that though. Twice a week I create two bi-weekly backups and about once a month I pull the backups down to my local machine for a permanent backup.
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>The backups have saved my butt once for stupid user error on my part where I had to partially restore one of my databases :-)
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>The backups hold all the sites, my SQL backup folder (from nightly backups), my MongoDb backups.
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>So basically everything runs on a single machine and drive. This isn't optimal but for my needs this works fine. If this was more mission critical I would probably have a separate box for the data servers (SQL and Mongo) a Mongo cluster back on the main machine plus an external backup storage device to back up to directly instead of the copy local then push to Azure.
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>But this is economical, but space is tight with the 100gb drive on the $40+16 plan. Vultr doesn't have an easy way at the moment to add storage except creating a separate linux storage machine which isn't quite the same.
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>+++ Rick ---
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>>>I went through this about a half a year ago and I checked out a bunch of cloud services. I was in the same boat as you with a server 2008 R2 machine. The machine's perf was fine for what I needed but at 6 years old there started to be a few hardware issues (one of the backup drives failed and occasionally the box just wouldn't come back from a restart).
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>>I have been reading through that message and it is really great.
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>>I was curious to know about your backend database. Is this SQL Server? If yes, have you installed a version of your own or you are going through SPLA?