Filesize of Plesk complete backup much too small??

[Intermedi8]

Hi everybody,

i want to update my server to the new Debian Etch distribution. Because of that i have to do a complete backup of my server with all settings, clients, domains and everything else. I tried the pleskbackup utility with the parameter all, which worked without errors. Also the --check-backup verification told me the file is ok. However the filesize seems to be muuuuuch too small. Only the hdd data of my clients is about 3 GB. Now when i add settings, many many emails with attachments and everything else it have to be even more, but the backup file is only 1.9 GB?? How is that possible?? Im afraid to Update my system caus i cant believe all the server data should be stored in such a small file, thats almost impossible?

 

[Satoriya]

The more safe way to update the Server is to configure one more server with the latest Debian installed, then install Plesk there, ask Parallels support for temporary license key and configure Plesk there.

After that, you can try to restore Plesk backup from the old server.
If this case you will get the shortest downtime of the services and in case of any problems you can also come back to the old server.

 

[Intermedi8]

Ok, but that doesnt explain the filesize of a complete backup? On top of that i only have one server and no possibility to use another one, so i guess thats not a solution for me ...

 

[Highland]

Keep in mind that Plesk compresses everything into a gzip file. Furthermore, consider that plain text (web pages and databases especially) compress very well. I have around 400MB of databases that I dump out, tar and gzip and the final file is only around 65MB. I had to manually extract something from my Plesk backup once (~3GB) and the final extraction left me with 8GB. So it's not all that odd that you have 3GB used but only 1.9GB after everything is backed up.

 

[tiramisu_]

there is file /etc/psa/psa.conf that contains info about mail Plesk dirs.

generally, you need vhosts+plesk itself+mails. that should be a approximate backup value.

moreover you may check with:

http://kb.swsoft.com/en/1757

yes, Plesk uses gzip.

if there is something else I may advise, kindly let me know