How do YOU do a backup

[Hostorea]

I have my own ways, but how do you backup client websites?

[thewebhosting]

To backup client website you can configure the backup through WHM ---> Configure backup from Backup section.

[kdoShaun]

Personally I have 2x Backups for my servers.

4 Partitions
- Home
- Root
- Backup
- Backup Root

Each night:
- Cpanel does its default backups to the backup partition (mounting / unmount)
- I have a custom script that copy's the root partition to backup root (not decending into other volumes) (mount/unmount)

I then copy the weekly offmachine and that goes into the Offsite rotation strat.

I also have a second entyr in the grub.conf to boot centOS of the Backup root if the first root gets trashed. And having KVM/Serial Console access to the box means im close to 100% safe from Data Corupted Failures.

[HorburySchool]

I have a bunch of scripts that dump all MySQL databases into tarballs per database which stay on the server and are overwritten on weekly rotation. I then have a dump script which runs every 24hrs and dumps /home (which includes the MySQL tarballs), /root, /usr and /var to a spare internal drive.

The entire server (more or less) is incrementally rsync'd every 10minutes via cron to a clone box (same hardware etc) which is also set up as a MySQL slave so more or less realtime replication of databases. This takes place over a dedicated 1Gb interface (crossover cable between the two boxes) so as not to consume bandwidth on the public interface. This gives me a second server I can immediately pull into action if required. This 2nd box dumps itself by rsync to a windows box every 24hrs, which backs it all up to external HDD every week, and the external drive is switched over weekly and taken off site.

I could possibly be considered an rsync addict...!

[TaneNZ]

nvm. . 10 characters

[gnummep-martin]

To backup client website you can configure the backup through WHM ---> Configure backup from Backup section.

Sorry for being so to the point, but how hard is it to read what somebody actually posts? It seems more like you preg_match on backup and then give this reply.

Anyway, I have a custom-made rsync backup script from my server provider. Works perfectly; it first backs up the ACLs and then all files from /home and other essential server data to an off-site server.

[Spiral]

The entire server (more or less) is incrementally rsync'd every 10minutes via cron to a clone box (same hardware etc) which is also set up as a MySQL slave so more or less realtime replication of databases. This takes place over a dedicated 1Gb interface (crossover cable between the two boxes) so as not to consume bandwidth on the public interface. This gives me a second server I can immediately pull into action if required. This 2nd box dumps itself by rsync to a windows box every 24hrs, which backs it all up to external HDD every week, and the external drive is switched over weekly and taken off site.

I could possibly be considered an rsync addict...!

I don't understand why you waste the time or additional resources dumping databases or why you would use a cronjob that puts you on a 10 minute delay and risks corrupting your databases in the process?

Why not simply turn on live MySQL clustering and be done with it?

That way your second server really will be in perfect sync with your primary server and you don't have to worry about any messy rsyncs or slow cronjobs!

[HorburySchool]

p'raps cos I don't know how... !?

[david-r1soft]

Why not simply turn on live MySQL clustering and be done with it?

MySQL Clustering is Excellent. Clustering while providing excellent high-availability and in cases scalability will not accomplish backup and archiving.

We need to be careful with replication / clustering and not ignore backups. Replication will also replicate accidental deletes (number one cause of data loss) as well as malicious deletes caused by an intrusion. Let alone the need for offsite disaster recovery.

And depending on the nature of the data set most environments find they benefit from having recovery points of how their data looked at previous points in time for a variety of reasons.

You may be interested in a technical paper I wrote covering backup methods for MySQL databases: MySQL Backup Technology - Technical Papers - R1Soft Continuous Data Protection - Docs - KB Articles - Technical Papers

[bornonline]

r1Soft account and MySQL CDP off-site.

[bhd]

WHM's backup has always been problematic for us. Couple of years back we wrote our own script that does a round-robin backup over 7 days. It's not perfect and it has very little documentation but it does the job for us.

Basically it uses the cPanel backup script to do the heavy lifting but does it's own scheduling and FTP. It also has a cPanel WHM module but that still needs some work. (The command line version works well)

One of the things we recently added was a way to throttle the remote FTP uploads with one of the cpan modules. We found that large backups would often eat all the bandwidth and slow down normal user access.

Feel free to download it and if enough people are interested I'd be happy to work with someone to get some proper documentation together for it as well as a better install script.

[dwykofka]

For our corporate sites (billing - project tracking - customer tickets - cms) we dump the sql databases every hour and send them to an offsite ftp at our office.

I dump the db's with a date '+%d.%I'-filename which gives me:
17.05-database.sql

I then compress and upload these files to our ftp server with the overwrite option enabled which gives me hourly dumps for a full month.

Then we do your regular daily cpanel full daily+weekly+monthly backups off to the same offsite ftp.

That FTP server has Symantec CDP installed that runs to another datacenter.

I really wish cpanel had a seperate built in sql backup function and s3 integration.