Thursday, January 25, 2007

Using 4psa Total Backup

I have bought Total Backup from 4psa for Plesk and was having an issue with the automatic transfer of files from the host to backup server. Using FTP seems to work fine, but I couldn't work out how to use the SSH transfer.

I finally worked it out. You need to create a public/private key pair and then add these to the backup server's authorised keys within the profile of the user you want to log in as. I'd been doing this, but not as root and that was why the transfer was falling over - shame the debugging info wasn't that great.

Login to the backup server and create the account for the backup.
sudo adduser rbackup
Now log into the host server, create keys and enable passwordless login to the remote backup server - remember not to specify a passphrase for the key pair.
sudo -s
ssh-keygen -t rsa
ssh-copy-id -i /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub rbackup@backup.server.tld
Confirm the login process by ssh rbackup@backup.server.tld

If you don't now create the directory that tbackup is expecting to log into remotely, it fails with a very unhelpful message. So, if (in the settings section of the tbackup page within Plesk), you have set backups to be stored in /rbackup/foo, you need to ensure that his exists on the remote system.

If there are issues with tbackup and you need to do some debugging:
/usr/local/tbackup/do_backup -d

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi,

At the moment i'm facing the same problem as you discribe above. But when I run the command:

[root@web01 ~]# ssh-copy-id -i /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub rbackup@server.tld


I get the following error:
-bash: ssh-copy-id: command not found

I'm using CentOS 5, do you have any idea how to figure this out?

Unknown said...

Would appear that CentOS doesn't come with it as standard (but I'm no expert).

You could try and google for it and download it as suggested here:

http://ircarchive.info/centos/2007/3/30/5.html