Fastest backup restoration method?

Arkaic

• June 23, 2015 02:58

Hello, I'm looking for a method of backing up my servers which would provide the fastest way of restoring service should the worst happen and we have to completely reinstall on new hard drives. At the moment my plan if the hard drives fail or OS needs re-installing is; 1 - Install CentOS, cPanel. 2 - Restore account backups. 3 - Compile easyapache/php configuration/tweak settings again manually. Obviously step 1 can take up to 90 minutes on my servers, so I'm looking for a different method of backup/restoration if anybody has any suggestions? Thanks!

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  rackaid

  • June 23, 2015 15:55

  The easiest way and often the fastest is to use backup and disaster recovery software that includes bare metal recovery (BMR). We've use R1Soft and when properly deployed it works well. BMR eliminates the need to manually reconfigure the server after a restore. Also with most BMR software, the block level restore process is orders of magnitude faster than any file based restore. In our experience, we can restore GB's per hour using BMR and can have relatively stable restore rates. File based methods, e.g. gzip/tar that cPanel uses, carries a lot of processing overhead. This is especially true if a site has a large number (>20,000) files per directory or thousands of small files. cPanel backups are great for small sites, but as soon as you start having dozens of sites or need rapid recovery options, the cPanel backups are a slow process. If you decide to stick with cPanel backups, I highly recommend you download your EasyApache configuration file, php.ini, my.cnf, firewall config and any similar customized settings.

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  Arkaic

  • June 23, 2015 16:02

  Hello and thanks for the in-depth response. I'm curious what the typical recovery/restoration time would be for a full R1Soft restore rather than individual accounts? For example if there were 500GB of data on the server. Ignoring backup server to cpanel server transfer times, how long would it take for the restore process itself to complete usually?

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  alsmith

  • June 24, 2015 23:20

  I do it totally different. I use a seperate hard drive in my servers then I use rsync to keep the two drives in sync. In the event of a main hard drive failure I have the DC boot off of the second drive and service is restored. Now it is not quite that simple but it works and I've tested it and used it before.

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  cPanelMichael

  • July 10, 2015 17:23

  I'm curious what the typical recovery/restoration time would be for a full R1Soft restore rather than individual accounts?

  
  Hello :) I suggest contacting R1Soft directly with this question. This is the type of information their sales stuff should have on hand. Thank you.

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