Issue Worst Plesk Backup System

[quantim]

We had an unfortunate situation, our both servers plesk and cpanel crashed. Luckily we had backups and we were able to restore cPanel server quickly but plesk has got worst backup system that we were not able to restore sites easily. We had to do manual restore. We are storing all domains directories: 2021-05-06_16-49-17 Today I spoke with plesk support and got this reply: "Plesk stores backup info in its database, just placing the files madeon other Plesk server is not enough"

Why on the earth you need a database to store a backup? Why it can't be so simple? Why not just generate .tar.gz files just like cpanel does and restore on the fly? Why I have to upload backup files when they are present in the backup directory? We planned to use plesk 10+ servers but decided not to and will be moving to cPanel if we can't find an easy backup solution.

 

[weltonw]

I'd take a look at this:  How to restore Plesk Onyx and Obsidian installation on a new Linux server after disaster

The backups contain all the necessary data you need - files + .sql dumps.

 

[Denis Gomes Franco]

@quantim The backup and restore functions in Plesk are not as straightforward as Cpanel's but I have used them before to both transfer subscriptions between servers and archive canceled subscriptions, and they do perform as expected.

First thing I do after launching a fresh server is to change the backup's encryption key. Plesk says that this is used to protect passwords stored in database dumps and by default it uses its own key which cannot be reused on a different server. So in order to not have any problems restoring the backups on a different server I just change it to something else. This encryption key does not seem to affect anything else at all, as I have downloaded backups in the past and they all opened just fine on my desktop computer.

Plesk backups are made up of a bunch of files containing all data for that subscription. Then when I go to download a backup from the panel, Plesk packages these files in a .tar file before sending it over. This is the procedure I use whenever I need to archive a canceled subscription, so I just store a single .tar file for each subscription. Also, Plesk asks if you want to password-protect that .tar file, I just ignore it.

Restoring that subscription is a bit tricky though. I need to first recreate the subscription on the destination server, then upload that .tar package back into it (with the "Upload backup files without a valid signature option" checked), then start the restore procedure. Not sure why Plesk couldn't simply recreate the subscription for me, though, since the backup file already has all the information it needs.

And things get trickier if the subscription is larger than 2 GB, but I guess this is a problem with Cpanel as well. If that's your case then you can simply run the restore procedure via CLI after uploading the file to the server via other means, eg. CURL, WGET, FTP, SSH, etc.

Also, check this out: How to restore a Plesk xml.tar/xml.zip backup file on another Plesk server

 

[pleskpanel]

I wouldn't say that they're the worst but they could use some help. It would be awfully handy if there was a "Add Website from Backup" in which you would select either a backup file path or upload one and the customer/subscription would be re-created along with its DB (assuming that it doesn't exist). As the previous poster comments, you'd need to ensure to be able to specify a backup file path as the days of tiny backups regardless of compression seem numbered.