There is no such thing as being too safe in terms of managing web server. Your hosting provider may have provided complimentary daily backup to your VPS or Dedicated Server, you do weekly and monthly backup of your FTP files and database, but still worse thing can happen which you do not expect. The consequences can be fatal: permanently loose some or all of your data.
If you already do the regular backup then you can probably restore everything with the cost of your time, or the hosting support team may assist you to restore their daily backup. Then again, there is a possibility their backup is on the same node that is having the problem.
Having a remote backup is one of the most simple precaution you can do to add another layer to your disaster recovery plan. One of the reasons web/IT people hesitate to do this is because it means doubling the cost of the web server since you need to host a new one in preferably different location. Well, in my case this obstacle has been solved as I managed to find a couple of companies that offer special product only for this purpose.
How Does It Work?
Unlike most web hosting providers that offer complete tunning services that include web server, email, database, etc, a backup only plan will only offer a large disk space that you can access via FTP. To do the automatic backup, you can use Rsync which is a great Unix tool to do increment copies of your server files. That combined with cronjob setting, you get an automatic, regular, secure, and efficient backup of your server.
Who Offers This Kind of Service?
When I did my research, I found two companies with good reputation that can provide FTP backup plan with very reasonable pricing. They are not big players in the hosting industry, but they offer excellent service and I am very happy with the results they one of them so far. Here are the links to those ompanies you need to check:
There you go, hopefully this little tip can help you to sleep better at nights knowing your server files are backed up and you have a complete backup of your files on different server.