Reseller Backups

[reanimat]

Hi there!

Just wanting to get some information / idea's from other resellers on the hostgator network about Backups. Primarily how do you backup your clients data (if at all), and if you do this manually or use software or PHP + CRON. I am aware HostGator backs everything up on the Sunday of every week, but still recommends for clients to backup their own data.

What do you do?

Sam~

[GatorFord]

Sam,

I can't speak for actual resellers here; I just wanted to point something out if you were unaware. While we do perform backups of all our shared and reseller servers on a weekly basis, if a user is over 50,000 inodes or 20GB of space usage, they will not be rsync'ed to the backup server. This is one of the reasons why we of course highly recommend customers always keep their own local copy of backups as well in the case of some sort of disaster.

That being said, cPanel package accounts are quite CPU intensive and are taxing on the server, not to mention there is also a size limit to how large an account a client can backup. The most efficient way to backup entire directories and most normal user content if you're not directly packaging the accounts would be to use an offsite SSH/rsync service (something like bqbackup.com) where there is a cronjob setup to perform an incremental rsync of everything that's changed. This is the most efficient way to backup in terms of bandwidth, and after the initial run, disk IO.

[reanimat]

Hi Ford,

I am not to well versed with SSH / Resync, however would I not have to buy SSH access to all accounts on my reseller package? or can I run this from my root account?

Regards,
Sam

[quietFinn]

Originally Posted by reanimat

Hi Ford,

I am not to well versed with SSH / Resync, however would I not have to buy SSH access to all accounts on my reseller package? or can I run this from my root account?

Regards,
Sam

You can run the backups as crontab jobs.