Backing your Linux VPS is a best practice to ensure your data's safety and availability. In this paper, we outline the methods and tools for doing backups of a VPS.

Step 1: The Importance of Backups

Since backups have their own importance, a few reasons include the following:

1. Prevent Data Loss: This indulges in protection against accidental deletion, hardware failure, or cyber-attacks.

2. Disaster Recovery: Get your system back quickly in the event of any catastrophic event.

3. Data Integrity: Maintain the consistency and correctness of your data over time.

Step 2: Choosing the Right Backup Strategy

Common strategies that can be used for taking backups of your Linux VPS include:

1. Full Backups: This is simply a complete copy of everything residing on your VPS. Being comprehensive, it is also a very time- and space-consuming approach; hence, it is generally coupled with other backup types simultaneously.

2. Incremental Backups: Incremental backups record changes made since the last backup, whether full or incremental. Therefore, this approach is faster and storage-friendly but restores data at a slow pace, keeping in view the multiple backup sets during restoration.

3. Differential Backups: Differential backups keep changes made since the last full backup. This type of backup is a balance between full and incremental, thus being faster at restoration than incremental but consuming more storage.

Step 3: How to Back Up Tools

Some introduction to popular tools to back up your Linux VPS follows.

1. Rsync: It is a very popular command-line tool used for efficient transfers and synchronization of files between a source and a destination. It will preserve file permissions and other file attributes, offers the ability to output information in a verbose manner, and compress data as it's being transferred.

2. Tar: Another command-line utility that can assist with building archive files, which can be compressed and stored. This is very helpful to prepare one single file that contains everything you want to back up, so that you can move or store that efficiently.

3. Duplicity: It's robust software that allows encrypted, bandwidth-efficient backup of files to a great many storage systems, including cloud storage. It is able to deal with lots of different cloud services, including Amazon S3, Google Drive, and others.

4. Bacula: It is another enterprise-level backup solution and runs the gamut of features for managing backup, recovery, and verification. It requires setting up Director, Storage Daemon, and File Daemon; it can automate backups and handle them very efficiently.

Step 4: Automate Your Backups

To make sure that your files are backed up time and again without having to do it manually, this process can be automated by writing cron jobs. Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like operating systems, including Linux. For instance, you could back up your data automatically every night, using rsync; that way, your data will be backed up on a daily basis.

Step 5: Verify Your Backups

Make sure to verify your backups regularly so that they are complete and can be restored. The recoverability of your backups can be tested by doing a restore test, which gives you the assurance of integrity and the usefulness of the backups. This is necessary every time you need to ensure that you won't find out too late that your backups are actually corrupt or broken.

Step 6: Store Backup Safely

Store your backups safely and consider more than one location, if necessary. However, sensitive data should be considered for backup using encryption. Offsite or cloud storage may be taken into consideration to safeguard against physical disasters, such as fire or robbery.

Taking backups of your Linux VPS is a very important job. It may save you from big data loss and downtime. Learn the different strategies for doing backups, use the right tools, and automate the process so your data is safe and can be retrieved. Always remember to regularly verify the backups, and keep them securely in yet another location.