Full Server Backups - Offsite

[rchurch]

How can I make full offsite backups of the server?

Does PowerVPS have some guides to that?

How easy will it be to transfer the setup onto new servers?

How much will the Virtuozzo/Plesk foundation be a problem when it comes to that?

[capnqwest]

What control panel are you using? If you use WHM, it's extremely easy to backup and restore each account offsite under WHM's "Configure Backup." You can either back up to a FTP server you're running at home or do what I do and get a backup account with http://www.gnax.net. I pay $10 a month for 30 GB of backup space and I get a 100 mbps port.

[rchurch]

My personal server runs on Plesk, but I have another one lightly used that runs CPanel.

What of the full server backups? What solutions to you recommend?

I'd like to do them as often as possible without compromising the server performance.

[rchurch]

I have also read about rsync.

Can it be used for a full server backup without impacting preformance too much?

[charles]

There will always be impact due to I/O load. FYI, this is essentially how the VPS backups we do works.

But this is a good approach as rsync is very efficient and will only transfer the changes.
hth
charles

[rchurch]

Do you have a ready made script that does that the job?

[charles]

No, but rsync isn't very complicated. A one line call to rsync (with perhaps the use of --exclude-from and an exclude file) should do everything you need.

charles

[Fred]

On the top of my todo list, i have create the backup process...

to start, I plan to use my previous vps ( running at another provider ) to ftp it...

But i wonder how much BW and space it will use...
Any tips to help me do an approximation ?
Say my vps is 2gigs of data... A full backup will be how big using standard tar.gz ?

Is it smaller with one big tar.gz or is it the same if i have many small tar.gz ?

Also, any of you using the service of a2b2( http://a2b2.com/ ) for backup vps ?
i plan to use them since they are cheap and unmettered

[cprompt]

An alternative to rsync is a script I have used in the past called Reoback

http://sourceforge.net/projects/reoback/

You can configure it to perform a schedule of full and incremental backups which are tar files and then these can be ftp'd to an another server. The advantage it has over rync is that it builds up a collection of backups that you can go back through if you are needing to restore a file back to a specific date.
It's pretty simple to install and configure as well.

[charles]

But i wonder how much BW and space it will use...
Any tips to help me do an approximation ?
Say my vps is 2gigs of data... A full backup will be how big using standard tar.gz ?

Is it smaller with one big tar.gz or is it the same if i have many small tar.gz ?


Compression rates will vary based on the content. Plain text will compress to next to nothing. Images wont compress much at all. You should not see an difference in size between one big file and multiple small ones.

hth
charles

[Fred]

Compression rates will vary based on the content. Plain text will compress to next to nothing. Images wont compress much at all. You should not see an difference in size between one big file and multiple small ones.

hth
charles


thansk a lot for the info charles!