Question about incremental backups

[n000b]

Hi,

I am wanting to implement some backups on my server.

I want to do daily on-site backups on the server of all accounts, and then once a month I would like to do an off-site backup of all accounts.

In the cPanel backup facility, what is the benefit of incremantal backups over compressed backups? Why should I pick one over the other?

Do the incremental backups keep only ONE backup per user (ie this backup would get overwritten every day with the new files and I couldn't restore the account from more than one day back)?

Also, what is the "Backup Retention" for?

Finally, if I were to use cPanel's incremental backup feature for the daily backups, how should I handle the monthly off-site compressed backups?

 

[jayh38]

Incremental backups only backup files that have changed since the last backup was run. This is most efficient if you store backups locally (preferrably another partition and optimally on another physical disk) This saves allot of processor time as it does not package and archive entire accounts over and over. The downside is they are uncompressed and takes up more space.

So if you have the realestate to spare, go with incremental.

as for your remote backups, you can setup a cronjob to package all your accounts and then ftp them to your remote location. There are many services that would offer incremental via ftp Rsync which would be more efficient.

Yes, all backups only keep one copy of that particular time period. Incremental daily, is prepetually updating changed files daily, weekly will do the same but only once every 7 days and so on.

If you do not use incremental backups, your accounts will be packaged and replaced in full at each backup time you select to run.

 

[sparek-3]

Incremental backups save CPU usage at the expense of disk space. Compressed backups save disk space at the expense of CPU usage. So take your pick.

The one thing I don't like about the incremental system, is that it does not appear to remove empty directories. Say you have a directory at /home/user/public_html/files on Monday this directory is backed up with the files in it. During the day on Tuesday, the user removes this directory. When Tuesday's incremental backup runs, the files that were in the [bfiles[/b] backup directory are removed, but the actual files directory remains. Atleast that was the case when I last checked it, this may be resolved in later release.

As far as doing a monthly off-site backup, you will have to develop your own script to do this. It depends on how you are wanting to do the backups. If you are doing incremental daily backups, I would recommend using rsync to synchronize the current daily backup with the off-site monthly backup. Rsync will only copy files (and delete if specified) that have changed. It actually just copies the changed data in the files, so it really conserves bandwidth.

 

[n000b]

Thanks for the replies

I think I will do incremental daily backups and investigate rsync to do the monthly offsite ones.

Just one more quesiton, what does the "Retention Period" mean when setting up the backups? Does this apply to incremental backups?