Input How to back up to S3-compatible storages using S3FS-Fuse

[Denis Gomes Franco]

Hey everyone.
Just wanted to share some recent and interesting findings. I'm using the Backup to Cloud Pro extension and saving a full server backup to OneDrive. As I was running low on free space, backups didn't run on one of my servers. "Low space" relatively speaking of course, because the server has ~26GB of free space.

So I gave this some thought as I didn't wanted to leave a lot of disk space wasted just to be able to run backups. Damnit, with 20 gigs I can host some more 40 domains...

And that's when I came across this: s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse, which can mount an S3 compatible storage service as a disk under Linux. And I decided to give it a go.

What I did was:
1. Activated a Object Storage instance in Vultr. They are just a tad cheaper ($5 for the first 250 GB, then $0.02 afterwards) than Amazon S3. You can use any other S3 compatible storage solution, though.
2. Followed the instructions in the Github page to mount the disk and set it to mount automatically on reboot.
3. Created a bucket and then a directory for each of my servers to store their respective backups.
4. Created a temporary directory for each of my servers as well.
5. Changed the location of backups as per Where are Plesk Backup Manager temporary files located?
6. Set Plesk to save backups in local storage instead of Onedrive
7. Disabled the "Start the backup only if your server has the sufficient amount of free disk space" option

Using a remote disk as a temporary directory might not give the best performance but it worked. The backup operation did not needed as much space in the local disk as before and could be completed just fine now. And since the object storage is connected to the server, I'll just save the finished backups there as well instead of using OneDrive.

And with this my first set of scheduled backups of the servers has been completed flawlessly.

Now I hope this tip can help someone out there

 

[Powie]

Great... Doing it also on S3 Storage.

How many GBs are your full backups?
Have you trained also Recovery Scenarios without probs?

 

[Denis Gomes Franco]

How many GBs are your full backups?

~50 GB compressed. Also I don't like doing incremental backups.

Have you trained also Recovery Scenarios without probs?

Not in full, but:
1. there's been one incident recently and I had to restore one domain with about 30 GB of files + emails. That specific domain only had an older backup, done before that S3 modification, and it restored flawlessly. I think it would work just as fine with the S3 backups as Plesk reported the backup ran successfully.

2. out of curiosity a while ago I've downloaded a full Plesk backup to my PC just to see how files are structured, etc. since all my backups are full and not incremental, I am confident that even if the restoration is not successfull, I can simply recreate the subscription and put back the files, database dumps and mail messages. that would take quite some time but that's it.

And by the way, I don't provide hosting "per se", I run a web design agency that happens to also offer hosting services.

 

[Powie]

Ah 50GB is not small anymore...

I have trained some restores from S3. The biggest backup had 120GB. Its 3 to 4 times faster than having backups on SFTP.
One Restore Test has failed in the last month's, we don't know what's the issue, it was only a backup from one day, the next day works....
We use a password to secure the backups. Not a Plesk Secret.
This gives us the option to restore the backup also on a new server. I don't know if this also works with a plesk geneated secret...?

 

[Denis Gomes Franco]

Yeah, S3 services have a much greater upload speed than FTP, I guess. And yeah, I too use a password instead of a secret so it can be restored on a different server, but in the restoration I mentioned I still had to enable the option to ignore the signature or something (and the restoration was on the same server, not another one).

Plesk says that if you use a secret the backups cannot be restored anywhere else, and I suspect that it won't also restore to the same server that's been formatted/reinstalled.