Question How to optimize backups?

[MariuszB]

Server operating system version

AlmaLinux 8 and 9

Plesk version and microupdate number

18.0.59

I have several servers with Plesk. When I reach about 200 subscriptions and around 1 TB of data backup process takes a long time like 10-15 hours. I wonder how to optimize backups?

All Plesk installations run on Proxmox KVM VM. Servers are different configs but quite good like AMD Epyc or Xeon Scalable, SSD etc.

 

[Hangover2]

The built-in backup solution is not really useful for large Plesk servers with several TB of user data. On top typical backup recovery tasks of our clients like...

a) Can I have a database copy from 3 days ago?
b) Can you give me a mailbox copy from 5 days ago?
c) Can I get a copy of my webroot from yesterday?

... are just not practical at all. A fast recovery of specific small objects in external backups is not possible.

Giving us a lot of headache several times we did switch to other well-known tools like rdiff-backup, rsync or rsnapshot.

 

[ChristophRo]

We do still like the builtin Backup solution, as it allows our customers to see that there are in fact really backups made and available and also sometimes they use it to restore some stuff on their own. (but often it's like Hangover2 already wrote and we have to recover specific stuff for them)

We also have some big servers with multi TB data and hundreds of subscriptions and here the full backups takes 4-5h and the increments 20-30min
But these are all bare metal systems with SSDs for data as well as for the backup volume (that is local as well)
Though I wish we could get differential backups with the builtin Backup solution, as this would allow us to go to monthly fulls without the fear of losing to much data, should one incremental backup ever go bad.

As for a more proper/secure backup (these local Plesk backups are more for convenience) we use a Veeam Agent solution to get the data offsite and offline.

If the Acronis solution would allow own repositories and not force us to store the data "in the cloud" somewhere, we would maybe give that a try as well.
It's somewhat nicely built into the Plesk panel and due to being block based and "forever incremental", the performance should be pretty good, even with many TB

 

[Ohya]

You can backup with plesk just configuratión files and suscriptión info

With another script
Backup mails
Backup database
Backup web files

You can easy improve performnce of large backups as Hangover2 say, in my case, for large backups I recomend you borg or restic, those save you a lot of time and space.