Question Benefits of mutli volume backup

[occinodo]

Hi,

I was wondering about the pros and cons of making multi volume back-ups on Plesk 17.5.3 for Linux
Currently we've set it up so that a full back-up file will be created.

The issue with this is, that the back-up file is now about 12,5GB big and when something needs to be restored, the whole compressed back-up needs to be downloaded, is this different with multi volume back-ups? Or will all the volumes be downloaded in order to perform a restore? Is making multi volume back-ups usually reliable? Or is it more prone to errors?

I hope someone is able to share his/her experiences.

 

[mr-wolf]

I don't have the answer to your question, but I'm very interested to know if it can.
Personally I never considered that breaking these up would make it possible to restore a domain by only transferring the fileparts.
If that intelligence is indeed there I will quickly change my backup-scheme as I have a big problem with FTP'ing 200 GB for a 800 MB site.

My gut feeling says the optional splitting is only there to make it possible for some filesystems to handle them.

 

[mr-wolf]

@IgorG do you have an answer or do we need to test this ourselves????

 

[IgorG]

@IgorG do you have an answer or do we need to test this ourselves????

I just thought that all cons and pros were well described in Plesk documentation here Incremental Backup

 

[mr-wolf]

I just thought that all cons and pros were well described in Plesk documentation here Incremental Backup

Read the documentation of your link, but I think you mistook our question....

We don't want to know anything about differences between full and incremental back-up.

It's about the possibility of splitting the files.
It would, in theory, make it possible for the restore program to just download 1 or 2 of these split files and then restore a specific site.
I don't think it can....

BTW...

I used a weekly full back-up and an incremental daily back-up for a while, but I found this too stressing for the server.
The back-up of the incremental starting at midnight would still be busy during the day and thus hurting the performance.
The incremental back-ups would even take much longer than the full back-ups. The server, having RAID-1, is not that good on I/O and is more busy with finding out what to back-up than backing up itself.

I'm now only doing full weekly back-ups.
This means I have to go back a week (worst case).

 

[occinodo]

I've read the documentation on incremential/full backup, but since we find no issues in creating the back-up, we decided to stay with full back-ups since until now we found it reliable. However, restoring a website can now also take about an hour and I would love to decrease that time to something like 15 minutes or so.
So my first question would be, how are the expiriences in the field in regard to multi volume back-up (is it reliable, are there any ceavats?) and ofcourse, does it reduce the restore time.

 

[mr-wolf]

So my first question would be, how are the expiriences in the field in regard to multi volume back-up (is it reliable, are there any ceavats?) and ofcourse, does it reduce the restore time.

Mmmhhh....
So it seems you are referring to Full vs Full/incremental and not to single/multi volume back-up.
These are 2 different things.

Well, I already wrote you my experience on the Full vs Full & Incremental.
Back-up of an incremental back-up takes more I/O resources and results on my system in longer back-up periods than a full back-up.

I try to limit the amount of data on each server to no more than 200 GB although they can store 2 TB.
A full back-up keeps your server very busy during a relatively short period.
An incremental back-up can taken more than 8 hours which is just too long....
The subsequent FTP-transfer would then take place during working hours.

A restore would need both the incrementals (more than 1 probably) AND the full back-up. It would therefore always take much longer than merely restoring the full back-up.


@IgorG
I would still like an answer on handling the multi-volume back-up during a restore (although I'm convinced there is no special handling for that involving a shorter period).

 

[occinodo]

Sorry mr-wolf for probably being unclear, my question is really just about multi volume back-ups since we're not planning to do anything with incrementals anyway because I find the way how those things work too unreliable.

So the question is about what a full back-up would do with multi volume enabled.

 

[mr-wolf]

Sorry mr-wolf for probably being unclear, my question is really just about multi volume back-ups since we're not planning to do anything with incrementals anyway because I find the way how those things work too unreliable.

So the question is about what a full back-up would do with multi volume enabled.

OK...
So i understood you correct the first time...

As I wrote already I don't know for sure, but I don't give it much chance that the restore process can skip many of the multi-volume back-up whilst downloading them.
If it does, then I will move to multi-volume quickly.

If it doesn't, then it would be very nice if an enhancement could be written to do so.....

If skipping files is a problem then another enhancement could be that it stops downloading after it received all the needed information.

That would shorten some restores at least.

@IgorG.. I hope you will revisit this thread with some answers.

 

[occinodo]

Hi Igor, I hope you can take some time to look into our questions. Thanks!

 

[occinodo]

Hi Igor/other Plesk staff, could someone please shed a light on this?

 

[IgorG]

Guys, if I understand you correctly, you are interested in whether the use of incremental backup gives any advantages in the speed of extracting something specific? The short answer is no, it does not. But in upcoming Plesk version 18.0 it will be possible to pull out a backup of only one subscription from the full-server backup.

 

[mr-wolf]

No... you didn't understand it correctly.

We are interested to know if a multi-volume back-up would make it possible to speed op the restore process.
It is probably not implemented yet, but it would be very beneficial to many.

Now all the back-ups need to be restored first before any domains are restored.
With a multi-volume back-up it would in theory be possible to transfer the files containing the needed data first and Plex could already start with the restore sequence.

 

[IgorG]

@mr-wolf so far we don’t have this scenario released yet. We’re thinking about it, but multi-volume backups will definitely not help here.

 

[mr-wolf]

Thanks for your answer.