Question Can large backup files be split or restricted?

[tethis IT]

Hi there,

I'm working to improve the backup process of the Plesk servers I'm managing.
They all have around 500G of storage which is utilized up to 50% by several subscriptions.

If I want to restore something from a full server backup, I need enough free disk space to download it to the server.
So it happened to me that I had to increase the storage size on the server in order to do that. Which is quite a hassle.

So my idea now is to mount some sort of remote storage for the backups. That's possible with rclone, which allows you to mount e.g. a MS OneDrive somewhere in the filesystem and use it like a NFS share.

Of course I could ask plesk to create the backup on ftp or other cloud storage, but that would not reduce the disk space requirements for creating and restoring a backup.

Problem is: The files created during backup seem to be rather large, and OneDrive comes with a file size restriction. Max file size was 15 GB, they should have increased it to 100 GB recently.

QUESTIONS:

• What determines the maximum file size of a full system backup or a customer backup?
  Could be the complete used disk space of the server, could be the size of a complete domain including emails and databases.
  
  
• Is there some setting to restrict the maximum file size of a backup?

Thanks a lot,

Christian

 

[IgorG]

I think that this KB article may be useful for you - Is it possible to restore files from a Plesk backup located on a remote storage without downloading the whole archive

 

[tethis IT]

Hi Igor,

thanks for the response, didn't see this helpful article before.

Is it possible to restore files from a Plesk backup located on a remote storage without downloading the whole archive​

Actually, they suggest to " Mount a network share (e.g. NFS) to your server and store backups there." in order to reduce the required disk space for restore operations. That's exactly what I'm trying to do, I just want to use cloud storage instead of NFS.

It also explains that the backups are stored per subscription, so a single file cannot be larger than the data in one subscription.
That basically answers my question.

And in addition that, they state that Plesk Obsidian doesn't download a complete system backup anymore, in order to restore a few components.
That should solve any issue regarding the space required for a restore, but does not change the requirements for the backup itself.

All in all, that means my approach to mount cloud storage in the the filesystem and place the backups there is feasible.
Now I just have to implement it

I found that the Virtuozzo containers used for my webserver do not allow FUSE filesystems out of the box, so I have to wait for help from my hoster to move forward....

Thanks,

Christian