Better Backup

Define something.

 

I agree and I think that this thread should head in the direction of brain storming.


I was setting up a cPanelDNSonly vps for a customer the other day and it hit me.

Why not have a cPanelBackupOnly build that people can toss on a server in their office that will go out and get backups from their cpanel boxes.

1 benefit is that hackers wont be chasing down the backups from the public server.

Another benefit is that we can have the cpanel server generate a list of changes and the backup server can just download the changes.

Example: user acme
/backups/acme/acme-weekly-sunday.tar.gz
(contains full backup)

/backups/acme/acme-monday.tar.gz
(contains the new index.html the customer uploaded and a copy of the emails / db)

/backups/acme/acme-tuesday.tar.gz
(contains emails / db)

Just thinking out-loud here

 

To be honest, I think cPanel's backup system is appalling. Sure, it's a start and it definitely helps people who otherwise wouldn't bother making backups and would probably end up losing their clients' data when their system experienced hardware failures, but it's still not what it could be.

I'd love to see some kind of CDP system implemented in a future release, but this seems unlikely (cPanel is partnered with R1Soft who produce CDP software...it's far too expensive for smaller hosts like ours, however).

I plan to write some nice backup application in Python when I have the time. I've got exams coming up and a lot of projects on the go over at Refuge right now so it may have to wait a couple of months, but it's certainly a contribution I'd be willing to make. I guess I could write a plugin to integrate it with cPanel/WHM, too.

If anyone's interested in helping me write/test this, a PM would go down nicely

 

I program in almost every language except python....

Could you guys have the backups have the domain name in the file instead of a users name?

 

The problem with that is that you can have multiple domain names per cpanel account. Everything is really driven by the user not the domain.

 

So what does everyone think about a cpanel backup-only server?

Hosting server generates a list of things to be backed up and some config options like compress on host server or backup server, etc.

Backup server comes out to the hosting server and processes the list of changes provided by the hosting server.

Then we need Key Access to the backup server so that customers can request a restore, the cpanel server has a list of the available restore points. Restores can be automated (using access key to get to the backup server). Or they can be manually processed by emailing support then posting a pending job on the hosting server. Maybe it makes sense to just have the backup server contact the hosting servers every 30 minutes or so to check for pending jobs instead of having the host server contact the backup server or having support manually process the pending que from the backup server.

Replication option on the backup server for secondary archive?

Tools on the backup server to view / retrieve specific items from backups / databases?

Should we have a fully configurable backup schedule so that we can backup hourly during off peak times?

The idea here is to move backups off of our premium hosting boxes onto cheap disks and bandwidth.