Resolved Exclude /var/qmail/ from scheduled backup

[Xav2c]

Hi,

I have a space issue on my plesk server.
The server has 200GB SSD in RAID1, the /var/qmail/ dir takes alone 98GB in space, and the vhosts take 25ish more GBs.
As a result, the scheduled backup cannot run anymore because it needs at least around 50% free space to produce the compressed archive, prior sending it over FTP. It's been like this for over 2 month.
I tried to look for ways NOT to have to migrate to a new machine, like mounting a nfs drive from another server with HDDs in place of the /var/qmail dir, but obviously this will spark performance issues i do not want to deal with.
And this will not likely fix the backup on the long term, because the archive is created on the system volume.
In relative short terms, my only viable option is to migrate to a new 480GB SSD server (i can't wrap my head on downgrading to HDDs). But i just don't have the time right now, the ideal period would be this summer.

In the meantime, I'm looking for a way i can tweak the plesk cronjob that starts the backup to exclude the /qmail/ folder?
Or i could exclude the subscription that contains most of the data, so the backup would still run for all the other subscriptions.
Found this : How to create a full server backup excluding some clients/domains?
Thanks

 

[trialotto]

@XL2c

I would strongly suggest that you do a backup per subscription : not only would that save some space per backup, but also it results in data being more easily recoverable.

I am not sure whether you were referring to a "full server backup" (or some other type of backup) in your post - but the above would probably solve your disk space issue.

Just a tip: schedule the individual backups-per-subscription to start at different times and please install the Scheduled Backup extension to manage the scheduled backups.

Regards........

 

[Xav2c]

Thank you for your kind answer,

This sounds like a good idea, but i don't see myself setting up FTP backup on all the subscriptions (20+).
If i could set it for all subscriptions at once that would be great, i found this Is it possible to create scheduled backup tasks via CLI/API?
It looks promising, i'll look into that.
Cheers

 

[MarkM]

You mentioned mounting a drive from another server, so I'm going to assume you have resources available and will throw out some thoughts.

You don't need backups on SSD storage, so i'd scrub that completely and look at external backup solutions. Look at solutions such as R1soft CDP that you can run on another server of yours. You can even look at services such as this one that will provide you a CDP license and remote storage space for a set monthly cost; R1Soft licenses from CDPLicenses

 

[Xav2c]

Hey,

I already have an external FTP backup solution, with 8TB available, i can backup daily up to three month back.
The problem is that plesk creates an archive of the files to backup before sending it to the FTP, and i don't have enough free space for this file.

But this makes me think, if i mount the external 8TB to some temp directory, and use this temp to create the archive, it could work ... ?

 

[MarkM]

Disable the backups going to FTP totally in that case. You can mount the remote storage as local storage, and have Plesk do what it thinks is local backups but actually remote.

 

[Xav2c]

Yep, why did i not think of that ?!
Thank you, i'll try setting this up tomorrow, and will come give a report of how it went

Best regards

 

[Xav2c]

Ok so this was not conclusive, i spent some time making plesk able to write on the nfs mount (it was actually my first attempt at NFS, ever), then there was an issue because the tmp dir was inside the dump dir, i fixed that.
Now the backups seem to work but i can't download or restore them.
Not going to spend more time on this.

Finally, OVH had a nice deal this morning on a 2x480GB server (20% off) so i jumped in.
I will probably set individual backups for every subscription, but there it would be nice if there was an option in the full backup that backup all subscriptions individually, like with WHM.
With WHM, every subscription has its own tgz, and there is a final tgz for the server conf. Much easier to manage, export, restore, download...

Thank you for your help, it is much appreciated

 

[MarkM]

That was probably the safe route to take in the grand scheme of things. Assuming you did get it all working, I'd worry about the reliability of the backups

 

[ChristophRo]

I will probably set individual backups for every subscription, but there it would be nice if there was an option in the full backup that backup all subscriptions individually, like with WHM.
With WHM, every subscription has its own tgz, and there is a final tgz for the server conf. Much easier to manage, export, restore, download...

When performing a backup to "local storage", Plesk does create individual tgz for every Customer/Domain/Website, even on FullServer Backups.
So, if you are able to mount that external store via NFS and point /var/lib/psa/dumps to it (can by done via symlink) then you should be fine.

 

[Xav2c]

i edited the /etc/psa/psa.conf to point to the nfs storage, but there where errors executing the backup, the log is empty, and when i click on the backup name in the list, the server stalls with a 502 error

 

[Xav2c]

Oh finally i can see the content of the backup and start a restore, but anyway, i will still migrate tonight.

 

[ChristophRo]

Do you see more infos in /var/log/plesk/PMM/, respectively in /var/log/plesk/PMM/backup-xxx?

 

[Xav2c]

Yes i can see the backup log there, apparently all went smoothly, no errors

 

[Xav2c]

Ok so, final word:
I migrated all subscriptions to the new server, moved the failover ip to the new server.
(I had a huge issue trying to use ubuntu 18.04 with plesk and IPV4, which i did not have the time to look into so i downgraded the OS to 16.04, but that is the subject of another thread.)
Everything is working fine,
I mounted through NFS and a secured VPN tunnel my distant 8TB space, and changed the path of the dump and tmp directories.

This way, now the full server saves are executed per subscriptions, which is much better than a huge backup archive of all the server at once.

In case you come here for answers, i might add : don't put the tmp dir inside the dump dir, it won't work.

Thank you all for your help,
Xavier