Dedicated Server Backup

[andychev]

Thanks that has answered a lot of questions i also had. Further to it can you explain how many backups can be stored. For example:

If backups are set to run everynight and every week. so nightly and weekly backups does this mean that there are only ever two backups for a site? Ie every 24 hours the new backup replaces the old backup. And the same for the weekly backups.

OR

Can a chronological backup system be set up? So you may have two weekly backups (if there was a problem you would be able to go back 1 week or two weeks). Same for daily backups would it be possible to have 6? where the oldest would be overwritten. So in total there would be 8 backups per site allowing for restoration from 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,14 days?

Also is it possible to set backups to run throughout a 24hour day instead of at a particular time to reduce server load? Is it worth it?

[bdominick]

Just to update... I've decided to forego the off-server backup, based on Matt's feedback here. It makes a lot more sense. I can't answer Andychev's questions, but I do know that a lot of the server load Matt was worried about for my backup plans had to do with the offsite FTP.

[Matt]

Thanks that has answered a lot of questions i also had.

My pleasure.

Further to it can you explain how many backups can be stored.

Your first example is correct. The nightly is overwritten every day and then a "random" sample is taken from the daily backup to serve as the weekly backup. Same goes for monthly. So depending on what date your account was created, it has an influence on what day your weekly and monthly (if you have monthly) is archived.

Can a chronological backup system be set up? So you may have two weekly backups (if there was a problem you would be able to go back 1 week or two weeks). Same for daily backups would it be possible to have 6? where the oldest would be overwritten. So in total there would be 8 backups per site allowing for restoration from 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,14 days?

Sure but you would have to write the software, we could write it, or you perhaps can find a 3rd party solution for that, but it is not built into the regular backup system and would not be a good option for shared hosting due to load and disk space requirements..... Its probably why its not built into cPanel. That means if you had a 1 GB site on the server it would actually be using up 9GB of space (1 GB in /home and 8 GB in /backup) and there would be some complications there on how to find a large enough backup disk for that sort of backup schedule, and still be affordable. Might work fine for a small site on a dedicated though.

Also is it possible to set backups to run throughout a 24hour day instead of at a particular time to reduce server load? Is it worth it?

Please explain this one I am not conceptualizing the idea.

[andychev]

Please explain this one I am not conceptualizing the idea.

Traditionally i belive backups are done all at once? So the entire server is backed up at say 2am. I have heard it is possible to spread this over a longer period of time, im not entirely sure how this is acheived. Im guessing again it could be some sort of custom script to limit the processor usage that the backup consumes. Thus the backup takes longer but means the server isnt overworked for a period of time?

Im prepared to be called barmy on this one!

[jmarcv]

If backups are set to run everynight and every week. so nightly and weekly backups does this mean that there are only ever two backups for a site? Ie every 24 hours the new backup replaces the old backup. And the same for the weekly backups.

OR

Can a chronological backup system be set up? So you may have two weekly backups (if there was a problem you would be able to go back 1 week or two weeks). Same for daily backups would it be possible to have 6? where the oldest would be overwritten. So in total there would be 8 backups per site allowing for restoration from 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,14 days?

Also is it possible to set backups to run throughout a 24hour day instead of at a particular time to reduce server load? Is it worth it?

If you choose incremental backup in cpanel, you get a misnomer of a backup. All that means is that cPanel will use rsync instead of copy - tar - gzip, which results in a substantially lower load.

rsync does have an option to do TRUE incremental backups, where you could have a series of daily backups that include only the changed files.

I found a lot of backup scripts out there using rsync.

rsync backup script - now Incremental with little storage impact
Create Incremental Snapshot-style Backups With rSync And SSH | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials

As for linmiting load further:
Unused by cPanel, there is an option to limit bandwidth:
--bwlimit=KBPS
This option allows you to specify a maximum transfer rate in
kilobytes per second. .... etc ...

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Now, I am not sure if this helps on a backup within a server, but is meant I think to work across servers.