Avoiding Data Loss: Backup Strategies

In today’s digital age, data has become one of the most important assets for businesses and individuals alike. From confidential documents to cherished memories, data is crucial for both personal and professional reasons. However, data loss can occur due to various reasons. This included hardware failure, natural disasters, or cyber-attacks. All of this can lead to irreversible consequences. Hence, it is essential to have a backup strategy in place to protect and recover valuable data in case of any unforeseen circumstances. In this article, we will discuss the importance of data backup and provide some useful tips and strategies to help you avoid data loss and keep your data safe and secure

System Rescue CD: First Steps

 

Many of you have already heard about it or even used it once in a while, but most of you have probably not been introduced to it yet: Our rescue system! While hopefully not being needed at all, it provides many possibilities to fix certain problems and to bring the machine back online as soon as possible. When the server is down, every second counts. It is important to know what to do beforehand. Thus, I will provide you with some basic information first:

Welcome to the cPanel ELevate Project

 Goal

The cPanel ELevate Project provides a script to upgrade an existing cPanel & WHM CentOS 7 server installation to AlmaLinux 8 or Rocky Linux 8.

Disclaimer

We do not guarantee the functionality of software in this repository. We provide it on an experimental basis only. You assume all risk for use of any software that you install from this experimental repository. Installation of this software could cause significant functionality failures, even for experienced administrators.

cPanel Technical Support is limited in their ability to support experimental software. You should instead utilize the Github Issues page

Introduction

• Issues can be reported here
• Pull requests are welcome
  • Code contributions are subject to our Contributor License Agreement

This project builds on the Alma Linux ELevate project, which leans heavily on the LEAPP Project created for in-place upgrades of RedHat-based systems.

The Alma Linux ELevate project is very effective at upgrading the distro packages from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8 or Rocky Linux 8. However if you attempt use it directly on a CentOS 7-based cPanel install, you will end up with a broken system.

This project was designed to be a wrapper around the Alma Linux ELevate project to allow you to successfully upgrade a cPanel install with an aim to minimize outages.

How to Use Plesk for Backups

Backing up your crucial data is one of the most important things to keep in mind when operating your own server (no matter if it is a VPS or a Dedicated Server). Several tools and approaches are available for that. 

Contabo offers S3-compatible Object Storage which can be used for backups of your data. Your files are stored in our Data Center with three redundancy disks in Ceph. That means three drives can fail at the same time without affecting data. 

In the following article, we explain how you can use the Plesk Backup Manager with our S3-compatible Object Storage to back up your server running Plesk.

Preparing your Object Storage

Before setting up a backup for your Plesk instance, we need to prepare our Object Storage first. To do so login to the Object Storage dashboard here. 

After successfully login in, click on Create Bucket to create a Bucket, in which you backups will be saved. It makes sense to give it a fitting name e.g. the servers name or the IP address of the belonging server so you won’t lose track of different backups in your Object Storage. If you want, you can even create some subfolders in this bucket but this is optional.

Scheduled backups in cPanel and Plesk

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Creating backups is a very important task for every server administrator. A loss of data often occurs suddenly without a warning. It is possible to create backups manually, but we would recommend to configure automatic backups. The steps below were tested by us, but you should always check yourself if the backups are still running from time to time and if it is possible to restore the required data from it! A backup should be stored outside of the system. In the examples below we are using the Contabo Backup Space. You can order it additionally to your server.

Scheduled backups in cPanel

To configure automatic backups in cPanel, please go to WHM > Backup > Backup configuration. At first you have to set the tick at "Enable Backups". Then we would recommend to set the backup to "compressed". With incremental backups, you can not save to FTP in cPanel. The other global settings should be left the way they are.