Preferred backup solution?

[Sergey L]

Hello everyone,

We wonder what sort of backup solution you might use on your servers beyond built-in Plesk backup? Any 3rd party software or purely native native tools of Plesk, OS and virtualization or hardware platform?

 

[Oto Tortorella]

r1soft Server Backup Manager, the very best!

 

[Chris1]

I am using the Plesk backup but have the backup folder set up as a NFS mount to a dedicated backup server I use for client backups.

I also have full server backups at the virtualization level that go off-site to Amazon S3.

 

[Sergey L]

r1soft Server Backup Manager, the very best!

Thanks Oto! What do you like the most about R1soft?

 

[Sergey L]

I am using the Plesk backup but have the backup folder set up as a NFS mount to a dedicated backup server I use for client backups.

I also have full server backups at the virtualization level that go off-site to Amazon S3.

Thanks Chris! I guess client backup (NFS) is daily and server backup is weekly? Or do you do at different schedule?

 

[Chris1]

Hi @Sergey L

At the moment they are both occurring weekly but I have thought about making the client ones daily.

Edit: Just a question regarding the Plesk backups. When you choose incremental, you choose whether it is daily, weekly or monthly and at what time. But when you choose to do a full backup, it asks whether you want daily, weekly or monthly but my question is..on what days and times do these full backups run?

 

[Oto Tortorella]

Server bare metal restore (I use it also to move data), customer dedicated panels (I link the R1soft CDP panel from within Plesk, users can login using their FTP passwords), single or group file restore or download, mySQL backup and restores, lightness (it run smootly in a multi-server environment without loading so much disks and CPUs), solidity (I never had a non working backup in 6 years).

It is strongly integrated in cPanel using a dedicated module: http://wiki.r1soft.com/display/ServerBackup/Set+up+cPanel+plugin
Sadly no module for Plesk.

 

[Chris1]

Hi @Oto Tortorella

I have also looked at R1Soft. Do you have a cloud hosted or self hosted setup?

I was considering a cloud hosted option such as http://r1softlicenses.com but I'm located in Australia, would the distance matter much?

 

[Oto Tortorella]

I've a self hosted setup, never tried the cloud solution. In my opinion the distance is not important in daily replications and small restores, buy it will become important during the first replication and in case of bare metal restores or huge restores (and when you are in a hurry too . I have the main backup server in the same datacenter and on a 1 Gbps connection and the secondary in a different datacenter with a 100Mbps link. The speed difference is huge.

 

[Chris1]

I've a self hosted setup, never tried the cloud solution. In my opinion the distance is not important in daily replications and small restores, buy it will become important during the first replication and in case of bare metal restores or huge restores (and when you are in a hurry too . I have the main backup server in the same datacenter and on a 1 Gbps connection and the secondary in a different datacenter with a 100Mbps link. The speed difference is huge.

Thanks for the reply!

Currently I'm not big enough to get my own hardware into a DC so I'm currently using virtual servers via a cloud hosting provider. Unfortunately I'm limited to 100 Mbps locally which would make full server restores/backups painful

 

[Oto Tortorella]

I've leased dedicated servers, I do not have my own hardware. R1soft CDP in installable on vanilla CentOS/RHES.

 

[Sergey L]

Hi @Sergey L
Edit: Just a question regarding the Plesk backups. When you choose incremental, you choose whether it is daily, weekly or monthly and at what time. But when you choose to do a full backup, it asks whether you want daily, weekly or monthly but my question is..on what days and times do these full backups run?

Hi Chris, when you pick day and time - they are your preference for backup task in general. Both incremental and full backups will run at this day and this time. Just incremental is run more frequently

 

[Linulex]

rsnapshot

rsync with hard links, every day a full backup for the space of incremental backups.

We create 2 backups of every server:
1) local on a separate hardware raid1 mounted as /backup. daily, 14 days retention

2) weekly to an external datacenter, weekly, 4 weeks retention

regards
Jan

 

[danami]

+1 for R1soft. Just looking at the current average backup time for server backups comes in at 1h 9 minutes.

 

[trialotto]

simple rsync to Azure storage (blobs)

working on Plesk backup extension with (in rough outlines)

a) "standard" full backup, with

- scheduled backup
- excluded directories
- smart file transfer: execute task when traffic volume is low

b) incremental backup, with

- autodetection of (every) new file (except for files in excluded directories, as specified)
- automatic recovery
- fail-over in the cloud (allowing domain maintenance and failure modes)

 

[Kingsley]

none yet still looking for options

 

[daanse]

Yeah we use R1Soft too, but its so freaking slow....
We have a 1,3 TB Storage Space Machine with 12 CPUs and 24GB Ram.
talked to Support, this should be enough.
And Bare Metal Restore with r1Soft usually is NOT working :-D ...........

Any other Ideas with good performance and good Interface?

 

[Daniel Hendricks]

Similar to Chris, I mounted a DigitalOcean Spaces (S3-compatible) bucket and have my backups go there. If you need 1TB or more, though, DreamHost's S3-compatible object storage becomes cheaper per GB (their customer service isn't as good as DO, though).

 

[m3lezZ]

Normal way:

-> plesk fullback on external ftp-space.
-> 1x month fullbackup, 2x week incremental backup.

 

[jonsG]

Hello Pesk team !
I'm clueless. I have a bit of Linux experience, but am in no way a server admin.

I inherited responsibility of this server, and my web host basically says I'm on my own. I cannot for the life of me figure out which file needs to be modified. I know the directive to use, I just have no clue where to put it. Every configuration file just points to another configuration file, and they all say that they're automatically generated and I shouldn't edit them.
Cheers, JonsG