Submitted by rulez22 on Fri, 01/18/2013 - 01:32
Hi Got VPS with Centos 64 bit (v 5, not 6) I do upgrades all the time and virtualmin backups If say there is a problem with VPS one day, how quickly can the system can be put back online? All it needs is Virtualmin domains backup correct? New Centos VPS installation, new Centos Virtualmin installation by your script and fresh restore of all the domains, correct?
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Hi,
Yes, just backing up at the domain-level is recommended. It's easy enough (unless you have a crazy system setup) to recreate a system environment, then do a domain-level restore. IMHO it's pointless to do a full system backup if absolutely not necessary.
*** I find each time I install Virtualmin, I've learned a few new tricks to make my OS more secure and optimized, so reverting from an old backup would actually not be beneficial. ***
We've restored hundreds of domains once due to a system upgrade, for which we decided to simply wipe out the OS and start fresh. The whole process including getting the base OS re-provisioned was about 1 - 2 hours tops. Keeping in mind, we restored roughly 200 - 300 domains in the process, and made a number of enhancements to the OS setup.
Hope this helps!
-Peter
Submitted by rulez22 on Fri, 01/18/2013 - 06:50 Comment #2
great advice, Peter! thanx
Submitted by andreychek on Fri, 01/18/2013 - 08:50 Comment #3
Howdy -- yup, Peter is correct, most folks just perform a backup of their Virtualmin Virtual Servers -- and then to restore, it's just a matter of installing the distro, installing Virtualmin, and restoring the backups.
In the Virtualmin backup screen, you may also want to enable a backup of the Virtualmin settings as well... that will generate a virtualmin.tar.gz file at the same time that has a copy of things like your Virtual Server templates, Account Plans, and other Virtualmin settings that have been tweaked.
To do that, in the Virtualmin Scheduled Backup screen, go into Features and settings, and in there select all the options in "Virtualmin settings to also backup".
As far as how long it takes -- it's difficult to predict that exactly, but I'd make the assumption that it'll take at least as long to perform a restore as it does to generate the actual backup. Also note that using gzip to generate the backups (the default), is by far the fastest. Some folks change to bzip2-based backups to save space; and they are indeed smaller. But it also takes a lot longer.