KnownHost and backup question

[Dave G]

Good Day All
I can't seen to find any info on this.
Does KH do backups for us customers or are we responsible for doing our own I ask only because it's not clear in the doc's it only states "Free Backup"? If KH does backups of my VPS how often are they done and is there a charge to restore?

Thanks

 

[KH-Jonathan]

@Dave G

We do free backups every other day of your entire VPS. We keep approximately 5-7 restore points generally. Full VPS restores are free, whereas partial restores of only certain files/directories are $10.

Reliable, effortless VPS hosting in the US and abroad - whatever your needs, KnownHost have the package to suit you.

 

[Dave G]

Thanks Jonathan
I should know better and have been more clear with my question.

Just so I can be clear I am looking at taking on a new customer there site is around 3gb they are asking me about backup so if I asked you to restore there account on my VPS you can, and the cost is only $10.00 correct? By the way $10.00 is to cheap IMHO.
So I can tell my potential customer that there site is backed up ever other day Yes?

I have software on my machine that I use to do the backups my self of my customers and keep 6 copies in/on 2 different drives but this site is to big to download every other day.

Thanks

 

[KH-DanielP]

Dave,

The way our backup system works we can't "fully restore" a cPanel account per say, like a cPanel backup would. A full VPS restore, would of course, restore everything back to its original state.

However, if you wanted to do a partial it then depends on several factors. We have access to the original files but trying to manually pluck out all of the cPanel configuration files for a single account is not something we have available at this time, so you might have to manually re-create that account and then we restore the public_html files and attempt to recover the databases.

A note on MySQL databases , we can generally restore just one database if it is MyISAM, however if the database is InnoDB then we'd have to restore the entire MySQL directory at a minimum since InnoDB ties its self to the log files and central DB file as well.


Generally speaking partial restorations are more or less for I've accidentally deleted X files from my account can you restore them. It's not really intended for recovering an entire cPanel account per say.

 

[Dan]

Hi Dave,

Do you have an Amazon S3 account? I use that to do my own backups once a week although you can do them as frequently as you want. Take a look in the cPanel Howtos & Tutorials section at the post Backup script for Amazon S3 using cPanel backups, encryption, and logging if you're interested.

The script uses the cPanel backup engine so you can do a full restore of an account.

 

[Dave G]

DanielP
More questions if I use a backup service will this count against the bandwidth used by the site?
When using the cPanel backup in the WHM to backup internally does this count against the bandwidth used by the site(s)?

Dan, Thanks I'll take a look. I'll probable recommend that the customer this to the customer, do you know if the same thing can be done with a Google Drive account?

 

[KH-DanielP]

Dave,

If you use a backup service no, it will not count against the sites bandwidth, but it will count against your total VPS bandwidth.

The internal backup, storing it within your VPS will not count against any bandwidth usage.

Keep em coming, questions are good

 

[Dave G]

Thanks
This will give me enough info to get back to them.

Thanks

 

[Dan]

Dave,

I am pretty confident that the script I have written there will not work at the client level, only from the root level as it scans for all accounts on the server and backs them all up. However if they have SSH access and any scripting knowledge at all it would not take much to figure out how to get it done. I just thought I would throw it out there since you seemed to be looking for a way to back up your accounts yourself.

 

[Dave G]

Dan
I have software (BackupSmart http://backup-smart.com/) that I use to do full cPanel backups on all my other customer the problem is the site is 2gb plus several databases and is to large to do a download 3 times a week.
I will be converting the site from a home made CMS to Joomla this should reduce the site size and move more into the DB.
As for SSH and scripting knowledge, Ummmm I don't do SSH very well and don't have a lot of scripting knowledge and the customer has non so I'm thinking I can use the cPanel backup to backup the one (1) site to Amazon, Google or other, can't I?

Thanks

 

[Dan]

Dave,

I understand completely and can relate as I've been there.

The whole idea (IMO) is to have it all be automatic so that I don't have to manually download or upload anything myself (set it an forget it). But what it comes down to is that it has to work for you and if it does then that's all that matters!

 

[owine]

Here's what I do: Backup all sites to Amazon S3 ($0.095/GB/mth) nightly (slightly different method from Dan's tutorial), then setup your S3 bucket policy to move the files to Glacier storage ($0.01/GB/mth) after 3-5 days and to delete all backups after 14 days. This way, for a pretty low cost you have off site backups of every site ready for immediate use going back 3-5 days and available for use within a few hours going back 14 days. I use the built in cPanel backup engine as well so individual accounts/files can easily be restored.

 

[Chuck Topinka]

I've been looking in to using Amazon S3 as an offsite storage facility especially now that S3 is incorporated in WHM directly, but I can't make out the actual pricing to expect. I think I'd be in the $3/month range based on 100GB of standard storage and daily backups of about 10GB each day across about 30 cPanel user accounts (files). The S3 calculator for disaster recovery and backup has the pricing at nearly $1100/month.

I'm currently using FTP access into onlinefilefolder, but it keeps failing on two files that are over 2GB each. I got a deal with onlinefilefolder and paid something like $50 for 5 years or something. That was cheap enough for testing purposes, but I'm not afraid to pay a little for a solid solution.

I like owine's policy settings to use Glacier storage too. I'd probably keep stuff in Glacier indefinitely since there are always clients that crawl out of the woodwork after a few years and ask for something that is years old. "Sure, we can get that for you but it will cost $149.97."

Does the $3/month sound about right, or am I missing something? Do you have to have an EC2 instance or something to act as the "server" for the storage? I've seen some reports that S3 ended up being too expensive, but plenty others that say it is a great, cheap solution.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Dan]

Heya Chuck,

I have 10 gigs in mine and my last bill was $0.87.

It probably won't be an even 10x that number as I only run backups once a week but a bit higher I would expect.

If all you're doing is writing/retrieving files to S3 then you don't need anything else, just S3. You'll be using quite a bit of bandwidth too don't forget, both on your VPS and S3.

 

[Chuck Topinka]

Thanks, Dan. That's about what I was expecting.