Remote RSYNC backup only

Daniel Santos

• October 23, 2025 19:11

I've seen some posts of remote only rsync backups but over 7 years old so, I posing the question again: Is it possible to just backup using rsync?

From the docs, I'm guessing no but if I do a backup to local and not retain, and add a remote rsync, does the local backup gets everything from that account or does it create a structure and then rsync the rest, as on account transfers between cpanel servers?

It's a bit silly I have to backup to a local folder and then rsync everything, just to delete that folder contents over and over again. SSDs won't live as long this way.

Best regards

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  Alistair Mcintyre

  • October 23, 2025 20:12

  I believe cPanel still needs to build a full backup file regardless of how you are distributing the backup to your remote server. Rsync, in terms of backups, will stream the entire archive as a file, so the full file still needs to be built, sync'd then removed if you don't want the file retained localy.

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  Daniel Santos

  • October 23, 2025 23:28

  Sorry, I forgot to mention I was thinking about incremental backups.

  For that, rsync would be on the homedir and a first stage of backup would be around exporting DBs, etc.
  
  Backuply has a similar way of working. I have that in some servers and it does a local backup of dbs and some more stuff and then rsync to the backup server, along with the data (mails, homedir files, etc), in a incremental way.
  The dbs, and other files, of course, are always backed up but the files are synced.
  
  This is similar to the way cPanel transfers accounts between cPanel servers, if you select encrypted but not compressed.
  The bulk of the files are rsynced after the account and some stuff being created on the target server.
  
  

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  William Del Piero cPanel Staff

  • October 24, 2025 18:35

  Hi,

   

  Even when using incremental backups with a remote Rsync destination, portions of each account will still be temporarily stored on the local server before being transported to the remote destination. That said, once the initial backup is completed, subsequent backups should consume less local space during processing.

   

  You can find more details in the following article:

   

  Remote backup transport using incremental backups

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  Daniel Santos

  • October 27, 2025 12:28

  Thanks for  all of your feedback.
  Using Backuply until Cpanel provides a remote only backup.
  Local is never local. A NAS maybe or something like that but I'm not seeing people with multiple terabyte SSDs, doing a really local backup in SSD. Nor is common to see servers with SSDs and 3.5" Hard-disks
  Especially now with NVME.. 
  
  Remote only with Rsync, for me, is better than NFS as it doesn't come with all the permission issues, etc, a nfs mount brings. Rsync is straight out of the box, easy to configure.

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