Backup Options

laughingbuddha · Thu Jan 01, 2009 2:57 pm

Hi,

Just wondering what solutions u guys recommend for server backups.

The server I'm running already uses raid mirror, and is running 2 brand new SCSI u320 drives, but it can't hurt to have another level of back up in even of a hack.

I'm looking for a simple to implement automated method, that I can directly and quickly recover the server (or put on a new server if a hardware failure) from in the event of a failure.

Thanks,

Matt

breun · Unread post by **breun** » Thu Jan 01, 2009 7:16 pm

Check out BackupPC and rdiff-backup. The latter is easier to setup, but if you're going to backup multiple machines and/or like a nice web interface I recommend checking out BackupPC.

Others seem to like Bacula, though I always found that was too much geared towards doing tape backups, although it's perfectly capable of doing backups to hard drives.

Note that backup and recovery are not entirely the same thing. If you need to be able to do a bare metal restore you need more than a backup system. You could simply do some kind of minimal install and then restore the latest backup, or you could look into things like Clonezilla Live which can create bootable media that do a bare metal restore of an image.

laughingbuddha · Thu Jan 01, 2009 8:01 pm

I had looked at Acronis True Image Pro, then use something like Amazon E3 platform for storage. I only have the 1 server at the moment though.

Is Acronis any good as a bare metal backup and restore?

In the past I've used Nortons Ghost Enterprise, but that only ever in a Microsoft enviroment.

Matt

breun · Unread post by **breun** » Fri Jan 02, 2009 5:25 am

I don't have experience with those commercial products.

BerArt · Unread post by **BerArt** » Fri Jan 02, 2009 5:53 am

I am a user of BackUP PC and I can say it works perfectly stable and runs next to ASL with no problems...

faris · Unread post by **faris** » Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:13 pm

Another option is to use 4psa's server backup solution, possibly in conjunction with s3sync to copy the backed up data to Amazon S3.

Basically 4psa total backup will do the backing up either to the local hard disk or to a remote location via FTP of ssh.

It can do incremental backups quite happily.

You can then use s3sync, which is an rsync like script that runs under ruby (not ruby on rails -- same language, but different thing) to intelligently copy the 4psa backups to Amazon S3.

And you can use S3Fox, a plugin for Firefox that lets you browse/upload/download files to Amazon S3 to check all is well.

s3sync is a pain to set up initially, but once done it is a set and forget thing.

Faris.

laughingbuddha · Fri Jan 02, 2009 5:33 pm

What is 4psa like for recovery?

Matt

faris · Unread post by **faris** » Fri Jan 02, 2009 6:07 pm

there's a script that you run and it does the rest. however, documentation isn't brilliant. essentially you tell it where to restore from, and where to. it backs up everything important, not just plesk so generally you'd restore to a temp folder, then see what you want to restore from there. Or if you want to restore everything, you'd probably use /

You can also restore individual domains and files if I recall correctly.

I've used it a couple of times in the past. The first time was a disaster because the restore script wasn't very good at the time.

Highland · Unread post by **Highland** » Mon Jan 05, 2009 11:11 am

I use a cron to trigger the Plesk backup system manually (not within Plesk itself). Works very well provided you're not afraid of a few manual steps to do a restore.

laughingbuddha · Mon Jan 05, 2009 11:32 am

Does Plesk backup also backup a domains database, user details (such as passwords, mail accounts ect...)?

Matt

aus-city · Unread post by **aus-city** » Mon Jan 05, 2009 8:26 pm

Yes, the plesk backup is everything including undownloaded mail the works!

The new 9.0 backup (well the restore really but the pss-backup-manager) allows you now to choose from a full restore to only small parts.

I have not tried the restore but you can now restore as little or as much as you want in a menu now!

Highland · Unread post by **Highland** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 9:31 am

Plesk backup gets pretty much everything Plesk manages. Email, DNS, FTP, files and databases, it gets them all. A full restore off this type of backup would put your box back to the state Plesk was in before.

Griffith · Unread post by **Griffith** » Wed Jan 07, 2009 4:31 pm

Highland: could you please give more details how you perform backup and restore? Our biggest issue with pleskbackup / restore is that it is slow and does not support incremental backups.

If one choose to use rdiff-backup how would the restore process be then?

breun · Unread post by **breun** » Wed Jan 07, 2009 7:11 pm

Griffith wrote:If one choose to use rdiff-backup how would the restore process be then?

See the docs: you can just copy the file from the backup to the original location.

shoggy24 · Unread post by **shoggy24** » Thu Jan 08, 2009 3:28 pm

What i do is let Plesk backup run daily then i use rysnc to move it to an offsite location, that way i have a couple of rotation with all the necessary data needed to restore, which may come in handy in restoring to new Plesk install.