Solution Required: Off server backup, Incremental, Restorable in UI

[eugenevdm.host]

Hi guys,

I need some advice please. It appears there are a number of issues with WHM's built-in incremental backup to remote locations and either it seems one has to purchase another product, or one just have to live with these defects.

Primary goal:

I need to have my backups stored "elsewhere". I can't have them on the server. There are commercial reasons for this, and redundancy reasons for this.

- Commercially disk space on a good server is expensive. One has to maximise that what one has for one's clients. If I have a server with 300 GB of data, and I want to back up, I need to have at least another 300 GB for a full backup. That blows the budget.

- For redundancy it doesn't make sense to store backups on the server anyway. What if the server blows? The disk crashes? Sure, this is worst case scenario, but if my backups are off-site or somewhere else I sleep better at night.

WHM has remote backup but restrictions as mentioned below.

Secondary goal:

We need to preserve disk space yet be able to quickly restore a backup.

After logging a ticket to try and understand why I can't see any restore option in the UI, I was told the reason is that any backup that's not local is not restorable until it's copied back to the server.

So although I can have backups offsite, to restore them, I need to find the admin or do it myself, then copy a massive file back onto the server, then try to restore. All while my clients think there is no restore available and critical restore time is consumed by manual copying of files. Surely this isn't an enterprise solution? Surely clients who grow with WHM feel the same pain, as their storage increases?

Third goal:

Our WHM servers are growing. So are our costs. Please tell me that the reason why WHM backup is broken for my need is *not* because they have a parallel business model selling backup software? Has there been any new development on WHM's backup in the last few years, since they've owned JetBackup?

Finally we are getting an error every day:

ssh slave timeout

Was told this is the problem:

https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/articles/360045328234-Backup-Transporter-incorrectly-reports-failure-pruning-remote-directories

Was logged 6 months ago and no solution. Advice to have it fixed?

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! If CPANEL-39632 is indeed your issue, you can ignore the warnings as it is a false positive. It can be annoying, but it won't keep anything from working or keep your backups from being created properly.

For the other comments, it's really just a matter of improving other areas of the product first. Since JetBackup is so good and readily available, we feel we can focus on some other areas that need attention before adding features to the built-in backup system.

 

[eugenevdm.host]

Hey there! If CPANEL-39632 is indeed your issue, you can ignore the warnings as it is a false positive. It can be annoying, but it won't keep anything from working or keep your backups from being created properly.

For the other comments, it's really just a matter of improving other areas of the product first. Since JetBackup is so good and readily available, we feel we can focus on some other areas that need attention before adding features to the built-in backup system.

Hi @cPRex,

Thanks for much for making the effort to reply, I really appreciate it.

I guess in a way we're lucky - over a few years now we've never had to restore much at all nor our clients. Only recently I started doing audit and discovered the UI doesn't seem to readily have restores.

I know this isn't the place for feature requests, but if I was cPanel then I would update this text from:

```
Retain Backups in the Default Backup Directory
Retain backups in the default local backup directory, even after the system transfers the backups to another destination.

If you disable this option, the system will delete the backups after they move to another destination.
```

To:

```
Retain Backups in the Default Backup Directory
Retain backups in the default local backup directory, even after the system transfers the backups to another destination.

If you disable this option, the system will delete the backups after they move to another destination.

PLEASE NOTE: If you don't enable this option you will loose the ability to quickly restore backups in the UI and you will have to copy them back one by one.
```

I guess you sense I had some frustration. Well anyway, I've learnt and course corrected. I've convinced management that we need to purchase JetBackup for every new server. It's a $40 USD extra cost per annum but we have no choice. You see the thing is we don't buy in dollars so we're very sensitive to dollar purchases. For two of our servers we've now gone into a loss scenario but at least I can sleep better at night.

 

[cPRex]

Every day where you don't get a frantic call about having to restore an account is a good day for sure!

I can say there is work being done that would help automate the remote restore process. I don't have any specifics or any type of timeframe, but I know that's something we'd like to see improved.

It's completely okay to be frustrated. Whenever I think about these things I ask myself "is that something cPanel wants to do." For this example, we have a pretty solid backup solution that works for a majority of users. Does it work for everyone, especially if they have more complicated or specific needs? No, and I think that's okay. I'm not sure that cPanel in general works for everyone, as some administrators want complete control over every configuration file and want to finesse every specific line of code. When you look at a tool like JetBackup and how many options it has and how in-depth it is for *just* backups, it's easy to see why we aren't able to add all those things to cPanel itself, and since JetBackup exists it's something we just don't feel the need to explore. For the users that want all those extra options, it's there if they want the additional functionality.

It's like CloudLinux - are the features amazing? Yes! Would we want to sit and reprogram every area of cPanel so you wouldn't need CloudLinux to do all those things? No, because the tool exists, works fantastic, and is readily available.

I hope that makes more sense from my perspective about how we think about those tools.