What all data should I backup? How often should I backup? How long should I keep the backup data? Where should I store the backup data?

These are some of the common questions web hosts have, while deciding on a cPanel backup management system. In our role as Outsourced Tech Support for web hosts, we relieve them off such worries and implement a fool-proof backup system for their servers.

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Configuring and managing fool-proof backups is a critical activity we perform in our cPanel server management services. Here we’ll go through the most common decision points we have, while defining a cPanel backup policy.

Why take backups?

Backups take up valuable disk space. It induces server load when it runs. It just sits there gathering cobwebs with no apparent use. At least a few web hosts feel that backups can be done away with a well drafted “User’s Responsibility” in the End User Policy.

But, from our experience, we’ve understood that backup is a necessary evil. Backups do eat up server resources, but they are the safety nets that let you stay in business, even if a disaster strikes unexpectedly.

Customer data is a strategic asset. Backups allow you to bounce back to full service status after a disastrous server crash. The periodicity of backup, storage location, technology used, etc. determine how robustly we can recover from a downtime.

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What all data should I backup?

The short answer is, anything that won’t be available in a freshly installed server. This can include a lot, depending on how customized your servers are.

We determine the data to be backed up based on their importance and disk space availability too. A quick checklist is below:

1. Customer website and email data.
2. Configuration files and statistics data of users.
3. Database dumps and database files.
4. Configuration files of all services, including monitoring system, backup system, etc.
5. Files of custom installed applications.
6. If you use a legacy OS, its installation image.
7. License keys, SSL certificates, or any other data of 3rd party origin.
8. Optionally, some key logs like login data, command history, etc.

The most critical among these is customer data, especially email and database content. Those keep changing all the time, and a successful restore depends on how “fresh” the backup is.

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How often should I backup?

What to backup is determined based on how much you can use availability of backups as a marketing edge. For instance, once a week backup should be sufficient to restore your services with not too much damage to service reputation.

But if you guarantee backups to customer sites as a selling point, it needs to be run daily. For some webhosts, we even configure continuous data protection, which is then marketed as a premium service.

We usually recommend daily “incremental” backups often run during night time, as it doesn’t induce much load on the server, and gives decent coverage for those clients who need their websites restored.

By linking the daily incremental backup directory to a low-space-overhead open source backup system like rsnapshot, we extend the recovery points to a period of time.

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How long should I keep the backup data?

The duration for backup retention is determined based on how often the data changes and how critical it is in restoring a server. For example, if your server has a customized legacy operating system, the OS image has no life limit unless you migrate to a new server.

In contrast, customer email data changes almost on an hourly basis, and would be obsolete after a month. Our expert technicians recommend the following for customer data, and other frequently changing server data like usage statistics:

1. Daily incremental backup using cPanel’s native tool to an attached backup drive, which is linked to a daily differential backup (in a central backup server using a tool like rsnapshot) for up to 14 days.
2. Take weekly snapshots of the daily differential backup, and store them for 8 weeks (hard links and changed data used to minimize space usage).
3. Take monthly snapshots from daily differential, and store them for 3 months.

For system specific data like service configuration files, the ideal retention period we follow is 6 months, with backups taken daily.

How to choose the cPanel backup location?

It is easy to provide a backup location (folder where you wish to store backups), in the WHM -> Backup -> Backup Configuration -> Configure Backup Directory section.

But what exactly should be the location we need to give here? Any folder on the same hard drive? Or in any external or different location? These sorta questions often form a part of our decision making process.

The purpose of taking a backup is to be able to quickly restore it when it is needed. But at the same time, the backup should not be unavailable in the event of a server crash.

Ideally the backups should be available in a high speed media connected to your server, but not in the same hard drive. However, what happens if the whole data center goes down? Yes, its far fetched, but what if?

So, the answer is a balance of all considerations. We’ll address it by looking at the possible recovery situations we’ve encountered in our cPanel server management experience.

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Scenarios when you require cPanel backups

Backups are indispensable in various scenarios, and the commonly encountered ones are:

1. Customer requests for a data restore due to accidental deletion, security issue, etc. – This would be needed quite often if you advertise availability of backups.
2. A canceled customer (or one who forgot to renew) comes back to have the service restored. – This could happen probably once a month.
3. Accidental change in configuration files, which needs a backup restore. – Might happen once or twice a year.
4. A disastrous hard disk crash leading to partial or total loss of data. – Could happen (god forbid) to one of your servers once every 2-4 years.
5. A total downtime of the data center lasting more than a day. – Very low likelihood, but still known to happen, even to major data centers.

Decision makers for choosing backup location

Before finalizing a backup location for our customers, we consider the following aspects:

1. Cost – Storage space comes at a cost, so we always ensure an optimal usage of the available storage space. Storing backups locally in the same server or same drive is a cheap option for SMBs who cannot invest much, but less reliable as the backups can also be lost during a hard-drive crash.
2. Reliability – To ensure that the backups are available even in the case of a server crash, we usually configure external servers to store the backups. Backups can also be stored online, which are easily expandable and less expensive, unlike in the case of external drives.
3. Bandwidth – Since bandwidth usage is incurred while transferring backups to external servers, we configure VPN to connect to backup servers in the same network, to reduce the transfer costs.
4. Confidentiality – Though online backups are cheaper, they may be less secure and not readily accessible compared to the data stored in your external hard drive, which you have more control over.

Types of cPanel backup locations

Depending on the budget constraints and risk factors involved, we choose between 3 backup locations – A local disk attached to the server, a central backup server (or network attached storage device) that collects backup from all servers, or an offsite backup server to store the most critical data

For fast, low-load backups, we store daily incremental backups in a locally attached disk. It would also be the most used backup in restores. A central backup server is configured for weekly and monthly backups.

In the event of a server crash, system files stored in the backup server and daily customer data stored in the local disk can be used for restoration. To be truly resilient against data center crash, external backup in another data center is ideal, but its expensive.

Considering the very low probability of the event, we implement a course of action to keep just a mirror of the main company website in another data center. For some web hosts, we also keep a backup of their key customers that are crucial for business.

In the mean time, if you’d like to have one of our cPanel administrators evaluate and help you build your server infrastructure, check out our contact us.