Webmin: Filesystem Backup vs Virtualmin: Backup Virtual Servers

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#1 Sun, 05/31/2015 - 17:04
No Expert

Webmin: Filesystem Backup vs Virtualmin: Backup Virtual Servers

Hi,

As my server is fairly small and does not change frequently, I intend to do daily full Filesystem Backups from Webmin.

Is there any advantage to backing up virtual servers through Virtualmin instead / as well?

Thank you.

Mon, 06/01/2015 - 09:34
andreychek

Howdy,

The Virtualmin backups solve a few problems.

One, they include MySQL backups using a mysqldump, ensuring the MySQL backups will be correct.

Second, the Virtualmin backups make it easy to restore just one domain. So if a website within that domain is accidentally broken, or the Apache config is accidentally misconfigured, it's just a matter of restoring a single file, the Virtualmin backup for that domain.

Third, you can make daily incremental backups. Many people make a full backup sometime on the weekend, and a daily incremental all other days.

What I do on my servers is use the Virtualmin backups to backup all my domains, and I use the Webmin filesystem backup to grab a few extra things, such as a full copy of /etc.

-Eric

Tue, 06/02/2015 - 16:30 (Reply to #2)
No Expert

Hi Eric and thanks for taking the time to reply.

I had a few follow up questions:

(1) I've always created backups in tar format. Do I ever need to consider dump as described here: http://doxfer.webmin.com/Webmin/Filesystem_Backup#Introduction_to_Unix_b...

(2) I was expecting Virtualmin backups to be scheduled in cron but reading here: https://virtualmin.com/node/28775#comment-119730 it says that jobs are triggered by Webmin not cron. Could you please describe that a bit more as I'm confused?

(3) Finally, do you know if there is anyway to see if Webmin (Filesystem Backup) and Virtualmin (Backup Virtual Servers) backups have completed correctly without errors?

The reason I'm asking is because I want to run a script to transfer through rsync the backups to a remote location but I'd like the script to first check that the backup has completed correctly before starting the transfer. Perhaps there is some sort of exit code indicating whether it has completed successfully?

Thank you

Tue, 06/02/2015 - 20:25
andreychek

Howdy,

I use the tar format too, I find it easier to work with.

Backups are indeed triggered from within Webmin. Webmin implements some cron-like functionality, and triggers the backups at the appropriate times.

As far as errors go -- there is an option on the backup screen to generate an email if an error is encountered. You can also see whether they were successful by going into the Backup Logs.

I believe the Webmin filesystem backup would notify you regarding errors as well, and has an option named "Ignore read errors on files". That said, I haven't run into errors with that backup type before, so I'm not quite sure how that works :-)

I'm not sure that there'd be a simple way to test for that with both of them through a script (though the Virtualmin backup logs are available using the Virtualmin command line tools). However, note that both backup types allow you to specify SSH as a remote backup destination.

-Eric

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