Question Plesk: how to organize 1-1.5 TB admin backups?

[AndreyKashin]

Server operating system version

Almalinux 9.6

Plesk version and microupdate number

Plesk Obsidian 18.0.71 #2

Hello!

We have several Plesk servers with very large amounts of data (from hundreds of GB to 1-1.5 TB).
It is important to us that clients can see and restore data from administrator backups on their own right in the Plesk interface.

Problem:
- It is impractical to store such archives locally in /var/lib/psa/dumps: a full backup of 1-1.5 TB is collected for more than a day, it heavily loads the CPU and MySQL, as a result, the process freezes.
- On other servers with volumes of 250-700 GB, everything works fine.

Questions:
1. Is it possible to use external proprietary storage on a separate VM (for example, BorgBackup + Borgwarehouse) for admin backups so that:
- did customers see them in the Plesk interface,
- and at the same time such backups were not taken into account in the subscription disk space quotas?
2. Are there official or unofficial best practices for organizing big data backups (1+ TB) in Plesk?

Thanks!

 

[ChristophRo]

To get the full benefit of customers being able to see backups and restore from them, the Plesk built-in Backup Solution is the only way I know.
According to the documentation, the Acronis Backup extension offers similar benefits - but of course, there is a price tag...
It should be faster and less intrusive in therms of CPU, memory and disk usage though, given it's block based and forever incremental.
But we never used that, so I might be wrong.

We have several servers where we back up multiple TB of data and and the full backups are about 3TB in compressed (with "normal" compression) size.
These servers are physical hosts with plenty of CPU (24+ high clocking CPU cores) and lots of memory (256-512GB) and for the backup storage we use a dedicated 32/64TB NVMe drive in one of the free disk slots of the servers.
Yes, the full backup runs for like 4 hours or so, but so far we did not see or measure any significant performance impact during that time frame.

Of course, with such a setup you'll also need a second backup to a different location, in order to sleep well at night.
But this can be achieved by any of your chosen methods (Borg, Bacula, rsync, Veeam, etc.), as it's for "disaster recovery" only and does not need any end user interaction.