Hey Guys,
I have over 30 clients on various Shared / VPS hosting accounts, and even though HMS has backups. I want to build my own backup solution to ensure my client's data is always preserved. What i would prefer is something similar to MySQL administrator. Allowing me to setup automated FTP backups at midnight every day. Also I would prefer to have something that would make incremental backups so to not re download the same files over and over again. This software needs to be run from my workstation. My workstation ( windows xp ) will then remotely access the FTP server of every client's website and download the data to my local machine.

a 2 TB hard drive only costs about $240. I figure this is rather cost effective way of preserving our data.

After some searching I think I found just the program.
SiteVault v3.1

It does both FTP data, and SQL / MySQL.

That looks like a nice product and it's only $19? Does it work good? Have you done any restores with it?

It does backups very well. I like the fact that the backups are incremental. It checks all files on the server to see if any are newer then downloads only those. I haven't yet tried a do a restore, but it seems pretty simple to use thus far. I am only using it for FTP backups. It also has a SQL backup feature too.

I like how it also does multiple sites at once. Opens an FTP connection to each site at the same time and runs the backups. I have mine setup to do the backups at 10PM each night. I just bought a 2TB hard drive off ebay so I have a place to keep all the backups.

Download it and give it a try. Its fully functional for 30 days I think. After that you have to buy a license.

There are also 3rd party services that sell online backups as well, however I don't know of any to suggest offhand. The only points I would make about saving things locally on a single drive is

- Security: You're probably not using it for high security data, however if you have sensitive information keep in mind where it's being stored. Someone swipes your workstation and...

- Redundancy: This would augment an existing backup service, but it's useless to your webhost since they can't control it. Having backups in both locations is great; having them just at the webhost will suit the vast majority of needs; having them only on your local machine is a bad idea.

- Bandwidth: Make sure the bandwidth consumed by performing these backups doesn't cost you too much $ with your local provider, or raise the bandwidth consumed by your websites to the point where your host will charge you more per month for it. (Though incremental backups do a lot to address this).

Bandwidth is not an issue. The backups by this software are incremental. It only downloads new files, or ones that have changed.

I suppose if you are tethering your computer to a GSM data connection ( Iphone, or whatnot ) you might have bandwidth issues, but most people on a DSL or cable modem shouldn't have any problems with this.