Question Backup and temporary storage space

[Denis Gomes Franco]

I have set up my servers with a schedule to run a full backup to Microsoft OneDrive every day. However some servers can't complete the backup because they sometimes do not have enough free space to store temporary files.

So I'm looking at alternatives, and I have a few questions. Please note that I'm running full instead of incremental backups.

• Is it viable (performance- and integrity-wise) to use S3FS-FUSE to mount an S3-compatible storage directly to the server and then have Plesk save its backups there? If so, will Plesk use that storage as temporary space as well, or I'll still need to free up space in the servers' internal disks?
• Does anyone have any experience with S3PROXY? I'm planning to use Backblaze B2 as storage but it is not S3-compatible, nor S3FS is directly compatible with it, so it seems that I would need to use both S3FS and S3PROXY to make that connection.
• If using S3FS-FUSE is not possible/viable, then the block storage provided by Vultr (my VPS provider) would be a suitable replacement? It is a tad more expensive than what I pay now but, anyway...
• Is it good practice to use block storage provided by your VPS provider as backup and redundancy? Or is it better to have your backups sitting in another provider? They say that block storage can be disconnected and connected to any instance just like an external hard drive so in the event of a catastrophic failure of a server, I think I could just spin up another server, disconnect the storage from the old one, connect to the new one and run the restore procedure.

 

[Denis Gomes Franco]

Forgot to mention that there is also object storage, which is S3 compatible and cheaper than block storage, but still more expensive than B2:
Vultr object storage: $20 / 1.000 GB
Amazon S3: $23 / 1.000 GB
Backblaze: $5 / 1.000 GB
Backblaze states that they can offer a cheaper alternative precisely because they do not implement an S3-compatible API and associated infrastructure, which according to them is what makes S3 cost so much more.

 

[Bitpalast]

The temporary storage location for backups is not linked to any external storage space. It is located on your local machine and defined by these variables in /etc/psa/psa.conf:

# Backups directory
DUMP_D /home/dumps
# Backups temporary directory. DUMP_TMP_D should not be inside of (or equal to) DUMP_D.
DUMP_TMP_D /tmp

So if you get an error message that say that you don't have enough temporary disk space to complete the backup, you should probably move DUMP_TMP_D to a different location where enough disk space is available (on your local machine).

 

[Denis Gomes Franco]

Hi Peter, thanks for the answer. So that settles it, I'll have to also move the temporary folder, or point the /tmp folder somewhere else.

 

[Denis Gomes Franco]

So, I have some interesting findings regarding this subject, should I post here or in another thread?