What are your go to back-up methods for your servers?

general
1

I have a web server so I only back-up the website files and database and rsync them offsite.

I do want to take full system snapshots as well, any ideas on how to achieve that?

2

For most of my infrastructure I have moved to the concept of infrastructure as code, so I do not back up full servers – instead, I back up the scripts that build the servers, and those are on github. My web server data is on github and docker hub.

Full system snapshots are generally only useful during system updates. I do take a snapshot of my DigitalOcean VMs before I upgrade them, but as soon as the upgrade is done I delete the snapshot.

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3

Is your server a virtual machine? There should be a way to take snapshots of it.

If not, I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t require your server to be offline, like RescueZilla.

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4

Have a look also at Jetbackup 5.

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5

I use DirectAdmin which has really nice built-in back-up features. I have databases and files moving offsite via FTP every day. I have not had any issues thus far with this approach so it is the one I stick with.

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6

You should migrate your server to a KVM using something like virt-manager which has a nice snapshot utility and you can push those offsite. The virt-manager is very easy to manage as well so it will be a time saver.

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7

I have never used DirectAdmin but someone else had mentioned it to me at work. I might look into this later. How long have you been using it for? How much does it cost you?

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8

It has been about a year now and I pay for the cheapest $24 yearly license although I might upgrade to the $5 a month license because the pro pack has some really nice features. I love that they work with OpenLiteSpeed.

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9

I didn’t know DirectAdmin works with OpenLiteSpeed. Is this new or have they always done so? I might have to check them out just for that price range.

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10

I know it has been at least a few years since they added it, I am not sure when that was exactly. One thing to note is that the web admin console does not function, you have to edit the config files yourself.

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11

I am going to give this a try this weekend. Just to test it out since I have time off work for the holiday. I have been meaning to set this up and see how it works for my server for a while now. I don’t have anything major going on and if it costs me some downtime, I will have a few days to sort it out.

Do you know of a video or walk though I can read to get it going and make it easier?