BackUPs improvements suggestion

[Hubbitus]

We many speak about it in ticket (NFB-14208001) and HG stuff recommend me post it into forum.

As it may be not so obviously and I take long, very long time, to collect such info, Hostgator provide two backup capability:
1) Users manual backups from Cpanel. There no scheduling, must be done manually and downloaded. No per file choose of backup targets (you may only chose files, databases, mails). Have limit in 4Gb.
2) "Emergency" backups of full account. Made automatically each week for accounts have less then 20Gb and 100000 inodes. Restore of it have price $15.

Off course we always want all and free, such us free every day full account backups (by the way some hosters offer it). But I also understand arguments stuff such as different offpeaks for users in several countries, and work stuff bu restore.

Meantime, in critical situation many of us ready pay $15 for important lost file. But... apparently get known what backups even does not happened for you account.
I suggest next futures:

1. Firstly, If account exceeded some limit and backups stopped for it - immediately inform user by mail.
2. Provide user way choose files (include/exclude) to fit in that quota what should be backuped.

As I known weekly backups happened via rsync. It is cool and very powerfull tool. To do not add implementation overhead to hostgator stuff it may be very simple - some user files (like /home/<username>/rsync-include.conf, /home/<username>/rsync-exclude.conf) should be added to rsync backup command if exists. Thats all. And may be optional backup reports by mail...

[JChabot]

I use siteautobackup. It's free up to 1GB and only $4.95 monthly for 5GB and it's only $1.00 for every 1GB plus they have deals if you sign up for more than that. You can also decide how many days to save before overwriting - I chose 7 days. I backup reseller (whm) panel and all the cPanels in it. Plus I've also added cPanels that are not in my reseller package. The best thing is that if I need it restored I fill out a form from Hostgator and don't pay a fee because I provide my own backup. Now how sweet is that?

[Chimpie]

Originally Posted by Hubbitus

Off course we always want all and free, such us free every day full account backups (by the way some hosters offer it). But I also understand arguments stuff such as different offpeaks for users in several countries, and work stuff bu restore.

Ugh... everyone wants everything for free.

If your data is that important that you require daily backups to an off site server and that you're too lazy... I mean, too busy to do it yourself, you should have no problem paying the fee to have it done for you.

[GatorNate]

Hubbitus,

Thanks for these suggestions, as the admin currently working on improving our backup offerings I will definitely consider them. A few quick notes:

1) Auto backups every day are going to have to be a special service not something we can do for every user. Running backups across the entire farm simply takes longer then 24 hours.
2) Siteautobackup is cool, but it has the same limitations as the cPanel backups listed as "Users manual backups from Cpanel." If the account is using to many inodes or too much disk space, cpanel will fail to generate a backup and thus it will cause siteautobackup to fail as well.
3) The include / exclude file is a really interesting idea. I will have to investigate it a bit more before its implemented, but I have opened a feature request in our internal bug tracking system to make sure I revisit the idea in a little while. Right now we can see how much disk space and files are being used by a customer, by checking the file system's quota reports. An include / exclude file would change that and we would have to manually count files / size. That is a lot more disk thrashing on the server end, so a clever solution will probably be required.

We are also researching other options and ways to improve the reliability, quality, and usefulness of the backups we offer to customers.