New to WHM's Backup, basic questions

[GoWilkes]

I have a few questions regarding WHM's Backup option. I've never really used it, so I want to make sure I'm not messing anything up.

I have a server dedicated to one site. The site is HUGE, and has roughly 600,000 page views a day (expected to be closer to 12,000,000 within the year). It has a MySQL database tied to it that's about 4GB, and has about 500,000 text files in 60,000 directories that are used for visitors to send Private Messages, etc.

Example:

/home/mydomain/userpath_1/[user]/inbox.dat
/home/mydomain/userpath_1/[user]/sent.dat

/home/mydomain/userpath_2/[user]/inbox.dat
/home/mydomain/userpath_2/[user]/sent.dat

And so on. There are currently three /userpath_[X]/ directories, and the first two have 30,000 [user] directories in them (the third isn't full, but when it has 30,000 users, the system will create /userpath_4/).

Knowing that, here are my questions:

1. How reliable is WHM's backup? Would I ever run the risk of being in the middle of a backup, hitting an error (ie, high server load crashes the server), and losing everything?

2. In the configuration, I want to have a daily backup, but even in the worst case scenario, I would never want to restore anything more than a day old. Under "Backup Retention", so I uncheck Weekly and Monthly? I'm guessing that's what's meant with this section, but there's no explanation so I wasn't sure.

3. Is there a reason to NOT enable "Incremental Backup"? Generally, it sounds better to only backup what has changed that day, but not if it's significantly slower. Are there issues with this that I should know?

4. Am I correct in assuming that "Backup Accounts" would back up everything from my site? Including the Private Message folders mentioned above?

5. Assuming so, is there a reason to NOT enable "Compress Account Backups"?

6. Under "Backup SQL Databases", is there a reason to not select "Per Account and Entire MySQL Directory"? Remember, there's only one account on this server.

7. I have a second hard drive on my server named /backup/, and this is the destination for the backups (naturally). Should I list it as "/backup", or "/backup/" (note the trailing slash)?


If there's any other advice you can offer, please feel free to let me know. I might be paranoid, but the site has 8 years worth of data; if I lost any of it by running an untrustworthy program, it would have major ramifications for me.

TIA,

Jason

(Note: I originally posted this under cPanel and WHM Discussions, but couldn't find a way to request moving it. If the moderators see this, please feel free to delete the duplicate posting under Discussions)

[garrettp]

1. WHM's backup does not deal well with large files. By default backups are compressed, and the larger the dataset to compress, the more time and system resources it takes to do so. I've never seen nor heard of a failed/crashed cPanel backup breaking things and causing data loss, but it is prone to failing when the server load gets high enough.
2. Yes, uncheck both of those. Additional retentions are always a good idea, but it's up to you how you want to manage your backup policy.
3. In your case it's probably advisable considering the size of the account(s). Just note that you can't use incremental over FTP (can only be used with a local store, or NFS mount).
4. WHM's backup copy everything in the user's homedir including mail, web files, stats, etc. Databases and mailing lists are also included.
5. See #1
6. Per account will give you SQL dumps of each database (useful for restoring the database as a whole, but no individual tables). A full MySQL dir backup can allow you to restore individual MyIASM tables but isn't as easy to work with.
7. Doesn't really matter, but I usually list without the trailing.

My best advice would be to keep additional off-server backups in whatever form you see fit. Whatever that means to you: rsync-ing them to a NAS account somewhere periodically or downloading them to your PC once a month or something else, but we're talking disaster recovery here (drives die, server gets blown up, etc.).

Make sure also to check your nightly backup logs in /usr/local/cpanel/logs/cpbackup/ to ensure they are completing successfully and address any problems found.

[GoWilkes]

Excellent info, thanks for the help! I've set it up now.

FWIW, the /backup/ on my server is a separate hard drive, so AFAIK, the only way I could lose all of my data would be if something catastrophic happened to the server location.

The server provider DOES offer an off-server NAS, but if it's in the same physical location, then that wouldn't be a lot of help; a fire that destroys my server would be just as likely to destroy the off-server backup.

Can you recommend a company that specializes in off-site NAS? If so, do you have any idea of how much this would usually cost?

[garrettp]

I won't show any partiality but you should be able to get it for $5-10/mo depending on the level of service and/or what you get with it.

[Indianets]

Hello,

For your needs, off-site rsync backup is the best bet. Try to diverse the location of your backup as far as possible, but remember to go with a trusted host/DC. You can find many backup providers and their reviews at WHT.

When you sync for the first time, you will be using the bandwidth on both sides more than the amount of your data, but later on only changed files will be synced on your daily/hourly backups which will cost you very tiny amount of bandwidth.

Some other solutions for incremental backups such as r1soft are also popular. But, if you dont have much use and just worried about a crash or something not a copy of backup every hour or everyday - rsync is the best.

Vijay