Since got my server up and running I have a question to webmin/virtualmin guru - what is the best way to backup it all? And how often - once a day?
As I understand options so far look like this:
1)backup entire filesystem with software like Acronis on to a second hdd (entire server has to be disconnected from internet for this procedure)
2)backup Webmin configuration on ftp server (like the one in your LAN) + Virtualmin backup of all users settings - websites files, settings, email accounts settings, their databases, etc.

Any recommendations? I will really appreciate it.

Webmin can handle all of your backup needs--you don't need anything else, though some folks like to use Bacula (which Webmin also has a nice module for). If the box has to be offline for Acronis, I'd say it isn't at all suitable for the job--servers are always on. There are many tools that work fine on a live system...use them instead.

Here's what I do on Virtualmin.com and our other two servers:

Use the Filesystem Backup module to make a weekly full backup and daily incremental backup. I have a remote backup account at our hosting provider so this backup can be stored on another system and disk. This makes use of dump or tar to backup all or some of the system. I use dump and I backup everything except for /proc, /dev, /lost+found, and /tmp. With compression a full backup shrinks to about 50% the size of the actual data...so I can have a full backup, plus a weeks worth of increments on a disk or shared FS of the same size as the primary system disk. This is pretty cost effective.

Use the Virtualmin backup feature to backup all of our virtual servers daily. I send this to a second disk within our server, so it's easily accessible and very fast to backup and restore from. These can be backed up locally, to FTP, to SSH, to a shared file system, or to S3 (in Virtualmin Professional only, and only if it compresses to less than the bucket size at S3).

I also use the Backup Configuration Files module just so I have a backup of the important configuration files on the system--if I do something stupid and break the system in a way that I don't understand, I can easily pull out an old copy of the file and compare. Since these files are tiny, backing them up is cheap, so I do it daily.

I've never had a problem that those backups wouldn't allow me to recover from quickly and without much pain.

Thanks for the answer! One question I've got - how do you exclude some catalogs from a backup?

Joe,

It would be great if you incorporated some sort of incremental backup into the domain bakups.

I'm backing up about 12 gig a night as it stands now. And most of the 12 gig is data that is static and does not change. Takes about 9 hours to back up all of my domains.

An incremental would be around 200 meg or so.

Thoughts?

John P.

Hey John,

I agree. Incremental is the next frontier. Obviously, dump supports incrementals, and I use them on all of our servers. But for Virtualmin virtual server backups, it's not provided. But, it would be relatively easy to add, I think. We just need a "last full backup" entry somewhere in /etc/webmin/virtual-server to keep up with when we last did a big backup, and then use find to tar up just the changed files. Putting them all back together would still require quite a bit of code, but as folks are using Virtualmin for larger and larger systems, it's becoming more important.

I'll file a wish in the ticket tracker. It'll probably take a couple more revisions to get it built and tested, but as you may have noted we roll out revisions every two weeks or so, so it shouldn't be more than a month away.

Joe wrote:
Hey John,

I agree. Incremental is the next frontier. Obviously, dump supports incrementals, and I use them on all of our servers. But for Virtualmin virtual server backups, it's not provided. But, it would be relatively easy to add, I think. We just need a "last full backup" entry somewhere in /etc/webmin/virtual-server to keep up with when we last did a big backup, and then use find to tar up just the changed files. Putting them all back together would still require quite a bit of code, but as folks are using Virtualmin for larger and larger systems, it's becoming more important.

I'll file a wish in the ticket tracker. It'll probably take a couple more revisions to get it built and tested, but as you may have noted we roll out revisions every two weeks or so, so it shouldn't be more than a month away.

Hi Joe

any news on the Incremental Virtualmin virtual server backups yet

Thanx

Shane

I believe it's coming in 3.58.

Hey Joe.

Hmmm.... Let's see, what can I say? How about thank you!

Just moved to 3.58 and saw the incremental backup feature. I'll start testing it this week.

Thanks!

John P.