Local repository and remote FTP (subscription) backup

[AbramS]

Hi All,

I'm looking for a solution to keep a local and remote backup of certain subscriptions or at least have a full server backup on FTP.

I have a livedrive.com reseller account which allows be to quite cheaply add 512GB of remote storage accessible through SFTP, FTP and WebDAV. I created this partition and added it as a server-level FTP repository in Plesk 12 (latest build). During testing I added a firewall exception for traffic on the FTP IP-address and figured that I had to put the FTP repository in passive mode to properly connect.

After setting this up I ran a configuration only backup to test if everything was working properly. The backup was created properly and can be accessed through the FTP as well: success!

My second test was running a full server backup through the manager. The ±40GB file was created properly (I could see my disk usage increase and decrease through new relic monitoring) and supposedly transferred to the FTP repository according to Plesk.

When I look at the FTP or the Plesk Backup Manager both indicate that the full server backup is 0kb in size. So something is wrong here... any ideas?

After this issue I figured: I really don't care about a full server backup, I mostly care about a specific set of subscriptions that have new content on a daily basis and need to be backed up properly as well. Those subscriptions are already on a daily or weekly backup scheme that places backups on the local repository.

What I would eventually like to do is create daily or weekly backups on the local repository and create weekly or monthly backups on the FTP repository for those specific subscriptions, but unfortunately you cannot (by default) setup Plesk to automatically backup to local and remote based on different or even the same intervals.

And this is the more important question: Has someone been able to create/setup a backup automation that keeps local and remote backups for the same or different intervals? Either through the Plesk interface, a plugin or a script?

Tips/hints/solutions would be greatly appreciated!

Running Plesk 12 on CentOS 6.6

Update:

Just tried running the same server wide backup, but this time as a multivolume backup. This resulted in the following error:

ERROR: () Can't upload file 'backup_info_1505301327.xml' to ftp. Error code: 1

 

[pleskpanel]

While Plesk holds its own in many ways over competitor control panels, it does suffer from a pretty dismal lack of development in the multiple backup schedule arena. Cpanel does an excellent job with this as it supports multiple backup schedules via the GUI and has for sometime so please consider voting for a multiple backup schedule feature at http://plesk.uservoice.com/forums/1...3703858-multiple-backup-rules-or-more-options

In the meantime, the quickest way to setup multiple backup schedules is by setting several cron jobs depending on the types of backups that you need (server repository/remote, whole server, individual subscriptions/domains, with/without mail/stats etc...). Here's a quick example to demonstrate a multi-volume backup that stores backups remotely, skips logs, doesn't include email, and prefixes the backup set with "daily" -

/usr/local/psa/bin/pleskbackup server --split=2G --only-hosting --skip-logs --prefix="daily" --ftp-passive-mode --output-file=ftp://yourftpprovider.com/subfolder/ --ftp-login=ftpusername --ftp-password=ftppassword

 

[AbramS]

Thanks for the info. Quite unfortunate that this has to be done through cron... Two questions:
1. On which user do you run these crons? subscription user or admin user?
2. The backup manager can also keep the amount of backups in check. How would one set that up through cron?

 

[pleskpanel]

To answer your questions:

1. You might want to run this as root
2. The backup manager does a beautiful job of cleaning up old backups. If you do this with a cron, you would have to write a script that checks for file names that contain a date older than x and that would remove them (hence the voting on the http://plesk.uservoice.com/forums/1...3703858-multiple-backup-rules-or-more-options link so that we don't have to implement wonky workarounds just to have multiple backup schedules and to clean them up with scripts or home-grown solutions)

 

[AbramS]

Right, so there really isn't that much of a solution at this point in time... I've already voted on uservoice, so hopefully I've contributed to getting this higher on the agenda.

On the up side: for whatever reason my planned server backup task did run successfully and did a perfect transfer to the FTP repository... Apparently the problem only lies with the manual backups...

 

[pleskpanel]

Without piecing together a clunky approach, you are correct. Plesk isn't very advanced when it comes to backups but hopefully Odin sees the value in fixing this since Cpanel does it incredibly well right out of the box.