What is a good Remote Backup solution?

I use S3 for mine as an off-site solution. I have daily backups kept for a week on my primary disk, purely for any local account issues, then all get sent to S3 each day too. The files in total are about 10Gb compressed, 40Gb if uncompressed. I needed an additional two cores head room for the backup to run effectively without creating a bottleneck for traffic... works effectively. Without those additional two cores for backup, original four core load was spiking to 15.00 and 20.00 respectively during the backup, with the additional two cores (6 core), now no more than 5.00 with global traffic as usual for my off-peak period.

 

Yes, S3 is a secured connection. See: Backup Configuration - Documentation - cPanel Documentation

To my knowledge, no, you can't select accounts that it sends offsite. If the account is set to backup, and you set offsite backups, then it sends it.

Saying that, looking at the S3 pricing, you don't get charged for sending data to S3, you only get charged for storing it and retrieving it. I haven't looked at whether a script could simply wipe out established backups automatically, so you aren't paying for the storage for those who aren't paying you.

 

Yes, if you're only using the WHM backup tool to do this additional service, then yes, that would do the job. They want that service, you just activate their account using the method you already outlined on a per user basis.

I only use the WHM backup, so not running other backup solutions.

 

At present, I haven't, as I'm waiting to see whether WHM backup removes them when it removes files in the backup directory. Otherwise, I guess just manually in the S3 container or I will investigate an automated solution. I only just shifted from ServInt to Linode, managed to self managed... so still testing some solutions for myself.

Yer, I had the same issue with ServInt in the past with needed backups. When i needed them, they had failed at their end.

I'm with Linode now, so needing the entire servers files really isn't an issue, as you can deploy a linux version and WHM within 30 15 minutes, then you just have to restore the server settings backup, then each account. But you can do all that in one sitting. So within an hour or two, have the entire server restored if a catastrophic SSD failure occurred.

If you really want, you can just install everything in a clean environment, all your additions and modules, everything but the accounts, clone the entire thing and let it sit on the smallest deployment version, which is $10 a month. I have thought about doing that, cloning my current setup, removing all the accounts, and just let it sit with an inactive WHM as an entire server copy. The more I think about that, writing this, I think I'm going to do just that...

No, your options are everything, OR, just the files as you can uncheck the DB, mail and sub-domains reinstalling... so you don't lose new db content.

I just did this with a nothing account to verify... and it worked as above. It restored the mysql user and permissions, but didn't touch the db itself. I made a change in the db to verify after restore, and it remained. So if your files needed to be restored, easy done.

 

I actually have a question about S3 here: Understanding Backup For Restoration awaiting an answer from someone who knows more about this stuff.

 

Ha... I reached 8 yesterday, and it deleted the first folder containing my first backup from my S3. It is only keeping 7 days backup folders in S3.

 

Me too, the moment I found out it worked with WHM's auto delete older backups.

There was no way I wanted backups building up costing me $$$ for useless space.

 

No idea... I don't remember having to play with any permissions, I just use my main account, setup S3 bucket, connected it and away it works.