Backup and Restore

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#1 Mon, 09/08/2008 - 05:33
camrant

Backup and Restore

Hello

Is it possible to backup a domain from 3.61 pro to 3.59 gpl?

I have tried and keep getting the following error,

Restore failed : The specified source does not contain any domains, or is not a Virtualmin backup

Thanks for any help

Regards

Will

Tue, 10/09/2007 - 10:37
Joe
Joe's picture

Both Virtualmin and Webmin include pretty extensive backup facilities, designed to handle different kinds of problems.

Here's what we do on Virtualmin.com:

Use the Webmin Filesystem Backup module to perform a weekly full system backup, and a daily incremental backup. This can use dump or tar to create the backup files. We pay ~$40/month to our hosting provider for a network-accessible storage account just big enough for these backups. These backups could be used to restore the whole system from a rescue disk, if needed (actually doing that in a hosting environment would be a challenge, so we consider it a last resort). We always have one weekly, and one daily file--the daily contains everything since the last "full" backup.

Use the Webmin Backup Configuration Files module to backup the configuration files that Webmin manages--you can add others to the backup, so make sure you get any others that you use that may not be under Webmin's control. This is an easy way to protect against stupid mistakes in configuration. We only keep one day of these. It's enough to protect against, "Oh, crap!" moments.

Finally, and this is the most important for us, we use the Virtualmin Backup feature to backup all of our virtual servers every day--all features--and we keep three days worth of these backups. This allows me to do something stupid and recover from it up to three days later. It also allows me to lose our server, and bring up these virtual hosts on any Virtualmin box within a few minutes, since most everything they need to operate is included in the backup. This is the beauty of using a standard configuration system across all boxes--I could even, generally, drop our RHEL4 generated virtual hosts onto a Debian 4.0 box and expect them to work mostly, if not entirely, unchanged.

I think this is the minimum level of backup protection folks ought to have in their hosting systems. Backups can save your sanity and hours of your time, and Webmin and Virtualmin make it really easy to setup.

There are more advanced options, as well, which Webmin also supports. Bacula is a fantastic backup tool, and Webmin has comprehensive support for it. If you're doing anything fancy, or need to aggregate backups from many boxes onto one file server or something, you might consider using it.

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Tue, 10/09/2007 - 14:53 (Reply to #2)
camrant

wow that was a fantastically thorough response thank you for such great direction

Mon, 09/08/2008 - 11:46
Joe
Joe's picture

Yes, the backup format is identical...though you can't restore features that don't exist on GPL.

Are you sure you're pointing to the correct backup file? (When backing up Virtualmin settings, it'll also create a file called "virtualmin.tar.gz" which is restored separately and via a different method...this is not restorable within Virtualmin's Backup and Restore page, and is not the virtual server backup. And I'm pretty sure this is the error you'd get if you tried.)

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