Plesk, Backup and Crashplan

Finally, I think I've found a good solution for Plesk and backup. For ages, I've been trying to find ways of efficiently backing up server data (www, mail mysql) and have tried to the Plesk solution, TotalBackup from 4psa and other rsync methods. To date, they all create a massive amount of data.

TotalBackup has served us okay. It does manage a backup of the whole server and then performs daily deltas, but each week, we still have a massive backup split up into 1000Mb files moving from server to server to facilitate an offline backup solution. And, potentially, with a server going down, we're still 24 hours out of date. Added to that, the restore process (which needs to knit all the parts of the backup together, apply the deltas and then unzip it, before offering the chance to actually get at your files) and we're in a position that doesn't really allow us the best backup/restore cycle.

I've been using Crashplan at home for a while now and love the product (especially after seeing what Mozy did with their pricing strategy and Crashplan promise not to do the same).

So, why not use the same technology with the servers... that's the plan, and that's what I've been spending the last couple of days thinking about. The plan is to backup:

• /var/www/vhosts (where all the www data is)
• /var/qmail/mailnames (where all the mail is)
• /var/mysql/latest (where my latest mysql db backups are)

For more information about the mysql backup process, see the separate post.