Question Full Backup and Snapshots for VPS

[CobraArbok]

My ISP has a backup service, but won't let me restore to another VPS of theirs.
So I'm looking for some solution that allows me to do a weekly full backup (with daily incremental ones), but which however allows me to do a full restore on the same VPS, but also on another VPS wherever I took it, even from another ISP.

It's an Ubuntu VPS, sometimes debian. So it could be a series of linux commands as well.
If it lets me use ftp/SFTP even better.

Also my ISP no longer provides a Snapshot service.
So if some changes to the server go wrong, I'm forced to do the Full restore, plus all the incrementals up to the night before. Any correct update (for example on data) performed after the last backup would be lost.

How can I work around this?
I should make a "Full" image to a folder of another VPS or S/FTP.

 

[Kaspar]

You can use the Plesk backups to recover to another server as well. As long as the server runs a OS thats supported by Plesk. But Plesk backups do have some limitations. An alternative that's well integrated with Plesk is Acronis Backup.

 

[Peter Debik]

The snapshot backup as it can be done from the hypervisor cannot be done on a running Linux system. Everything in Linux are files, and there are always processes that are writing to files at any given time. You'd need to stop all these processes for a millisecond, take the snapshot, then continue. The hypervisor can do that because it controls all processes from the "outside", but the system itself cannot do it, because each process only gets a timeslice and cannot access the others. If you don't do it from the outside, like the snapshot that your provider offers, you'll always end up with a snapshot that is not perfectly right, because it does not reflect the perfect system state. I am not sure whether there are (paid) tools meanwhile that have a solution for it, but in general the answer must be "no", no workaround, no snapshot. The best solution is to focus on a good server backup, e.g. using Plesk backup and to update missing configurations manually. These can differ from OS to OS version anyway.