Plesk backup killing the server

[nobody]

Ok...

The problem that has never ever changed with plesk. The backup problem. It either doesn't work or it crashes the server ...
And the best : When it crashes the server and you reboot the server it automatically somehow restarts the nightmare.
There is no way to kill it... And if you do kill it it leaves garbage in the /var/lib/psa/dump which then you don't want to delete manually in order not to cause some other kind of problem.

Now its been running for houuurssss and its stuck in 100% for 2 hours.
Its not uploading anything and there are 2 process running which I have no idea what they are doing right now.

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24973 root      30  10  117m  33m  724 S  4.7  0.9   0:32.53 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/plesk_agent_manager server --owner-uid=2d3269a5-a1d8-49e9-b54b-e73b6
24974 root      30  10  117m  33m  656 S  3.6  0.9   0:24.24 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/plesk_agent_manager server --owner-uid=2d3269a5-a1d8-49e9-b54b-e73b6

Scott and Mike. On behalf of most users (I believe so...) please create a script which we will be able to use to effectively backup our servers to a remote location .... Or lets all discuss it and maybe we can create something as a community ...
I am thinking rsync as one way but I've been troubled with a few things at that edge.

I mean its crazy. The server won't even use half of its resources and nothing is enough with the way plesk does its backup.
So the server needs in order to run all its domains 2GB and for the backup it need 8GB ram. And if you have swap enabled ? BOOM server is out of life...


Cpanel has its bad issues with remote ftp backup but at least it backups user data, and doesn't kill the server, neither it needs a RAM farm.

[nobody]

Ohhh and because they are aware of the problem they did the following ...
They wrote a backup script at parallels ! Yes thats right. I am not kidding.
They have a backup feature on plesk but because its soooo bad they have written a php script for backup. Thats how serious parallels is about backing up. And we pay a monthly license to these guys...

Their amazing kb

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http://kb.parallels.com/en/113252

Last update on that kb is just 4 days ago.
There is no documentation on that. For example what happens if you need to restore the backups etc.
They tell us to use this for backup script to solve the problem but they do not explain how you can use it afterwards when you need to recover the backup... Nice ...

And in order for this to run you must as parallels says in their forums

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Make sure that you have following options with 'On' in /etc/php.ini file:
allow_url_include = on;
allow_url_fopen = on;

They went all the way and did google integration, they even created a health monitor among other useless things but they wont fix their backup utility.

[paulie]

We used Plesk server backups for all of about 3 weeks... we'd become crazily paranoid and added it alongside our other backup process (r1soft), but since it crippled every server we ran it on we gave up quite quickly.

I wasn't involved, but we looked at http://www.4psa.com/products-4psatbackup.html back when Plesk 9 was new and that didn't work too well either.

In then end we just gave up, Plesk's overall design of their backup system doesn't lend itself it to a full server backup on a shared hosting platform, and to be honest when I'ved used it the restore process is also pretty awful too.

Without this turning into an advert for r1soft (I do like their product, I just don't care to advertise it for them), it or something like it (block level incremental backups with additional functionality specifically to deal with databases) is going to be by far your best bet for backing up large servers, unless you can do 1:1 mirroring. And even then I think i'd prefer r1soft on pure cost.

Ryan over at rfxn has started developing a possible solution for you though : http://www.rfxn.com/projects/irsync-incremental-rsync/ I haven't played with it at all but it looked very interesting.

Paul.

[faris]

I've never had any problems with 4psa totalbackup. It just works. It is more suited to data restoration than full system restoration, however.

The problem with r1soft CDP, utterly brilliant though it is, is the price including the mysql add-on. So that's $850 per server you want to back up. Ouch! I'm sure it is worth it though. I'd certainly have it if we could justify the expence. Our data centre offers it for $10 a month, plus $1 per Gb stored Double ouch!

[nobody]

I've never had any problems with 4psa totalbackup. It just works. It is more suited to data restoration than full system restoration, however.

The problem with r1soft CDP, utterly brilliant though it is, is the price including the mysql add-on. So that's $850 per server you want to back up. Ouch! I'm sure it is worth it though. I'd certainly have it if we could justify the expence. Our data centre offers it for $10 a month, plus $1 per Gb stored Double ouch!

I consider totalbackup expensive as well. This is what I am saying. Why not discuss it here and write our own backup solution for plesk ?
Its not something crazy I think.

[faris]

OK. list the features you want and lets start.

Note that valics offers a free plesk backup script. At least I think so. I've not looked in a while.

[breun]

I suggest checking out open source network backup solutions like BackupPC, Amanda and Bacula.

[scott]

We were going over some bare metal open source backup solutions in the #plesk irc channel the other day. Anyone interested in those?

[faris]

I didn't know there were any that worked on a mounted/being used volume. So very interested.

[nobody]

We were going over some bare metal open source backup solutions in the #plesk irc channel the other day. Anyone interested in those?

Very Very interested !

Plesk has a channel in IRC ? I didn't know that. Can you please send me info ?

Thanks Scott

[scott]

the #plesk irc channel is on irc.freenode.net

Some of the bare metal apps are:

http://redobackup.org/
http://clonezilla.org/

[faris]

Yeah, but all of these and others require booting into the backup environment -- you can't use them to backup a live server like you can with r1soft.

I'm disappointed that there's no open-source equivalent to it, but not surprised -- I imagine it is extremely hard to implement.

[nobody]

Yeah, but all of these and others require booting into the backup environment -- you can't use them to backup a live server like you can with r1soft.

I'm disappointed that there's no open-source equivalent to it, but not surprised -- I imagine it is extremely hard to implement.

Backup has been troubling me for years as all admins I believe. In servers that I do not use a control panel at all I have found ways and implemented my own scripts in order to backup to an external host on production.

But with control panels its a bit more complicated. Its not that simple that you run a tar on the whole /var/www and a mysqldump of the whole database. It needs a more compliecated solution.

Plesk normally stores all its files in 3 locations. These data need to be backed up.

/var/www/vhosts (has all the account vhosts)
/var/lib/mysql (has all the databases)
/var/qmail (has all the emails)
/etc (needs to be back uped as well)

Plesk configuration and all account-resseller configurations can be backed up easily. Even with 300 accounts it wont take more than 1-2 minutes to be backed up.

[breun]

I recommend not trying to be smart about what directories to backup, but just backing up all regular partitions.

I don't recommend backing up the files in /var/lib/mysql though, at least not as your primary way to back up MySQL databases, as they are not guaranteed to be in a consistent state when you back them up. I recommend doing SQL dumps and backing up those.

[nobody]

I recommend not trying to be smart about what directories to backup, but just backing up all regular partitions.

I don't recommend backing up the files in /var/lib/mysql though, at least not as your primary way to back up MySQL databases, as they are not guaranteed to be in a consistent state when you back them up. I recommend doing SQL dumps and backing up those.

I am not trying to be smart.

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http://kb.parallels.com/en/819

It is pointless to backup the OS. The point of backup is in case of a disaster such as hardware failure or in the event a site was hacked to be able to restore recent data and in the fastest possible time.

I have created a kickstart in order to minimize the install time of the server in case the disaster strikes.
The /etc is very usefull as it contains many changed configurations you may have done on the server.
Offcourse I do not copy the mysql files since if you need to do so the database must be stopped for consistency reasons. I use mysqldump and I also make a bz2 of the dump so the database backup is as small as possible.

But the point here is not to argue. We all know the issues that arise. The point is to discuss them and maybe create our own way of taking an effective plesk backup.

I currently do the following to reduce the load on plesk. I take a backup on the server repository and then I rsync the dumps partition to a remote site. I stopped the ftp backup procedure since it was killing the server.
Still my DR time is approximately 4 hours to 100% restoration.

I am seeking ways so we can all benefit a fast and secure way to backup plesk which will fully or at most part bypass plesk. After all what plesk does in order to backup is not rocket science...
It needs some time and effort in order an alternative way to be built but it is not impossible.

I have also written a script to backup non control panel servers which runs perfectly and uses ncftp to send files to ftp.
The load is minimal, it does logging which emails it to me and it consists of simple shell commands.

Can we do the same for plesk maybe ?

PS : The prices some companies ask for backup is crazy ! I would have paid myself for a ready made solution for plesk backup but I do not believe the ammount of money they ask is justified for what they sell. I feel they are ripping me off when they request 400-500usd for a single server. If I am to pay so much money I will pay 1000$ and get a much better solution from the market which will backup not just one plesk server but many.