Server backup questions

[joedom99]

We have a hosting server co-located in a data center that hosts about 50 small company websites. I'd like to improve our data protection capabilities. Currently we're doing daily incremental backups using WHM backup to a local backup folder on the same server. We currently manually rsync the whole backup folder to a remote server. How can I better automate that for consistency and ease of restoration? From time-to-time we also generate account-level backups using the backup features and then manually FTP that to a remote location.

1. Should I do a server-wide or account-level backups? I'm inclined to backup the whole thing, unless there's value in doing account-level ones (like ease of restoration).

2. Thoughts about using WHM's remote FTP backup capability or have the backup stored locally like I'm doing?

3. If I keep the backups locally, thoughts about automating the transfer of the backup folder - rsync, FTP, etc?

Any other tips or best practices appreciated.

Joe

[brianoz]

We keep cpanel backups and rotate them through a daily/weekly/monthly basis. If you have them on the same disk as the data you're protecting, that's definitely not best practice, although I understand if that's the hardware you have available.

We also rsync to a remote server using the cpmr script mentioned in this forum and at WHM Scripts.

It really depends on what sort of data protection you want:

• Do you need a history of individual files? (eg to protect against account compromises etc or accidental deletions)
• What sort of recovery eventualities are most likely?
• How will you recover if you lose a whole server?
• What sort of time will it take you to do that?

Work through those questions - there are probably others as well that I've missed as it's late here - and then set priorities and the sort of protection you need should become clear.

The problem with having a large pile of cpanel tarballs is that they can take ages to restore, especially on a busy system, so you need to take that into account in your planning. However in your case you only have 50, so that's likely not to be a problem for you.

[syslint]

We have a hosting server co-located in a data center that hosts about 50 small company websites. I'd like to improve our data protection capabilities. Currently we're doing daily incremental backups using WHM backup to a local backup folder on the same server. We currently manually rsync the whole backup folder to a remote server. How can I better automate that for consistency and ease of restoration? From time-to-time we also generate account-level backups using the backup features and then manually FTP that to a remote location.

1. Should I do a server-wide or account-level backups? I'm inclined to backup the whole thing, unless there's value in doing account-level ones (like ease of restoration).

2. Thoughts about using WHM's remote FTP backup capability or have the backup stored locally like I'm doing?

3. If I keep the backups locally, thoughts about automating the transfer of the backup folder - rsync, FTP, etc?

Any other tips or best practices appreciated.

Joe

If you need to take remote backup it is not good to use the ftp backup option, which will increase your server load, you may need ,
- Low cpu usage backup program
- remote , rsync incremental
- fast update
- No gzip compression
So may be take a look at cPremote : cPanel/WHM remote rsync backup plugin

[RACKSET]

How to uninstall cpremote?