External disk space for backups

[psytanium]

Hello,

I have 200GB space on a VPS server, currently I'm using 140GB, so the disk space is enough, but when the server run the daily backup process it fails because of disk space.

How can I solve this issue ? is there a way to use external drive ? or maybe delete the previous backup "before" the new backup process begin ? or something else..

Thanks

 

[cPAdminsMichael]

Hi!
You can always add an extra/external drive to the server for the backup storage. That should work just fine.

I'd recommend that you use remote storage though. There are plenty of providers offering S3 or rsync/ssh storage - we are one of them ;-)

 

[cPRex]

Do you know what size your daily backup is?

 

[psytanium]

Do you know what size your daily backup is?

Around 70GB

 

[cPRex]

Since that's the case, you'd need to have more room free on the system, or have a separate disk just for backups.

 

[psytanium]

Since that's the case, you'd need to have more room free on the system, or have a separate disk just for backups.

How can I have separate disk just for backup ? My hosting provider can only upgrade the vps plan, disk, memory and cpu.

Usually when the backup process complete, the retained backups delete ? can i set an option to delete the retained backup before the new backup start ? this way ill allow more space for the process.

 

[cPRex]

There is not an option to delete the old backups before the new ones complete. That would allow the possibility of no backups being in place if something were to go wrong.

You could always upgrade the VPS plan if you wanted to keep additional backups.

 

[psytanium]

There is not an option to delete the old backups before the new ones complete. That would allow the possibility of no backups being in place if something were to go wrong.

You could always upgrade the VPS plan if you wanted to keep additional backups.

I don't want to pay lots of money to upgrade unnecessary resources like CPU, bandwidth and Memory. Any way to mount external drive ? What possible solution cPanel offers ?

 

[cPRex]

You could use a remote backup system:

Backup Configuration | cPanel & WHM Documentation

The Backup Configuration interface allows system administrators to customize their scheduled backups.

docs.cpanel.net

 

[psytanium]

You could use a remote backup system:

Backup Configuration | cPanel & WHM Documentation

The Backup Configuration interface allows system administrators to customize their scheduled backups.

docs.cpanel.net

I was reading the recommended encrypted external drives services, listed in the documentation. For e.g. If I upgrade my Google Drive storage to 100Gb or something, does the system do the following "automatically" ?

1- Create daily backup on Drive
2- Remove retained backups from Drive
3- Restore anytime from the backups located on Drive

Thanks for some more information.

 

[cPRex]

Yes to 1 and 2, but for number 3 you would need to move the file back to the server manually before starting the restoration. This is outlined in our documentation here:

Backup Configuration | cPanel & WHM Documentation

The Backup Configuration interface allows system administrators to customize their scheduled backups.

docs.cpanel.net

 

[psytanium]

Thank you for the information. Still want to make sure if this option is available:
Is there a way to backup account database and public_html but exclude the emails ? because i have some users with 1GB website size but 30GB emails.

 

[cPRex]

You definitely could do that. You could use the exclude file as mentioned here to remove the mail directory from the backups:

Exclude mail folder from backup for all accounts

Hi there! How to exclude the mail folder from the backups but don't lost information about accounts (mail accounts, passwords, etc)? So, in a disaster recover (hd crash) cPanel will restore everything, including mail accounts and passwords, but not the email messages, webmail user folders, etc...

forums.cpanel.net

You may also want to look into the incremental backup option if you're concerned about disk usage and want to store multiple backups.

 

[psytanium]

Thank you, the mail exclusion helped a lot with disk space.
Just 1 more question. Any SSH command to check the whole backups size ?

 

[cPRex]

Sure! You could run something like this to check the backup size:

du -h --max-depth 1 /backup/xxxx-xx-xx

where "xxxx-xx-xx" is the date of the backup you want to examine.