Dedicated Server Backup

[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!