Question Best practices for plesk internal backups with many subs?

[Gugasian]

Hi there!

I am wondering what the best solution is to set up a proper PLESK full backup. I tried to use digital ocean spaces and also included the plugin to configure it in PLESK. But the big disappointment for me is that PLESK is saving all subscriptions in one file and temporarily keeps that file locally which consumes the same amount of disk space I already occupy.

Is it needed to make the backups subscription based in that case? I think that is not a good solution if you have more than 200 subs. Also I would need to do that in a specific period sub by sub otherwise I will face the same problem when trying to backup all at once, right? Is there any other possible solution or best practice to use the PLESK internal backup? Or do I have to use a 3rd party integration?

Happy to be part of the community. Thanks!

 

[ChristophRo]

I would recommend some external storage that can be mounted on your server via iSCSI, NFS, S3 or similar, thus from Plesk's view it's a "local" drive.
You then either symlink /var/lib/psa/dumps into that mountpoint or change the DUMP_D parameter in the psa.conf file accordingly.

When you create a regular/internal Plesk backup now, it will store all data on that external storage but still use separate files for each client and subscription. (even on full server backups created as administrator)

We use this for servers with 500+ subscriptions and it works just fine.

 

[Gugasian]

Thank you ChrstophRo!

My biggest concern is the fact that plesk is using a lot of temporary local disk space when performing the full backup. Will these temporary files also be evacuated to the mounted disk?

And if your server is rented and not in your local network is this solution still valid?

 

[ChristophRo]

Plesk does only really use/create big temporary files when performing backups via FTP (and maybe some other external backup methods I never used and thus lack knowledge off)
But full backups to "local" storage do not really use temporary space at all.

Yes, you can still easily use (m)any external storage's on rented servers (physical or virtual).
For example Azure blob storage mounted with blobfuse or Amazon S3 buckets mounted with S3FS.
You may also find external storage you can attach via NFS or iSCSI, though if these really reside in a different location than your servers, you may need to use an underlying VPN connection or something similar to assure data confidentiality.

 

[Gugasian]

I want to use use the S3FS solution with DigitalOcean Spaces. But this article How stable is s3fs to mount an Amazon S3 bucket as a local directory is pointing out some disadvantages when using S3FS. The biggest is that it seems to be limited to 5GB per file which leads me to the question:
Will this limitation make any problems with Sub-Backups or Full Backups on Plesk? I guess a subscription backup is saved in a .zip File which is often more than 5GB.
The other disadvantage is you can't make incremental backups but I think I could live with that. Full backups are more reliable anyway and the space is cheap enough to make them frequently.

Is blobfuse a better alternative?

 

[ChristophRo]

Hmm, OK, never really used S3FS myself and was not aware of these limitations (though it seems there is an option that allows you to use/create up to 5TB big files, at least I saw something like that in the documentation of the s3fs project)

If that 5GB limit would hurt in your case, I cannot say
The Plesk Server Backup creates individual .tgz files per subscription/domain (even divided into separate files for mail, website, etc.) so if you don't have a single subscription that exceeds this 5GB limit, you are fine.

As far as full/incremental backups goes and the mentioned problem with the impossibility of updating files just partially.....well, that would be no problem at all.
The Plesk incremental backup does not change or update the full-backup .tgz file, but rather just creates an additional .tgz file with the changed files in it. (see screenshot)



Anyway, maybe S3FS is not the best/right solution after all, and you're better off using EBS storage for that - though that may require an EC2 instance to attach the storage to and export via NFS or iSCSI to your Plesk server.

 

[Gugasian]

Alright. I think I will try the S3FS solution as it is quite easy to setup and check if I can manage the backups with that. I think thats the best way to find out if the solutions suits my needs.

Thank you very much!