Timeweb backup

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  Question asked

  more than three years ago

Hello, dear readers of the site shargaev-group.ru
! Most hosting providers do not support their clients on vds hosting, all the configuration and security of hosting is shifted to the shoulders of the webmaster or administrator. Website backups are no exception.

Therefore, so that this situation does not happen:

Of course, I also had such situations, and what just didn’t have to do to restore the site. But my advice to you is to learn from the mistakes of others, not your own.

There are several ways to back up your site:

The last two methods will be discussed below.

Hello, dear readers of the site shargaev-group.ru
! When you have one site for maintenance, it is not difficult to back it up. 10-15 minutes and a copy of the site is ready! But if you have more than 10 sites under maintenance and all of them are located on different accounts, the backup process starts to take a lot of time.

For this reason, I thought about how to optimize the process of backing up sites. My method is that at a certain time, the written sh script archives files on the server, creates database dumps and saves them to the specified directory. It remains for us to connect via FTP to the server once or twice a week and download the archives made.

I want to draw your attention
that example is shown based on Hosting Timeweb
(I really like this hosting and most of my projects are located on it). Don’t let this scare you, you can easily adapt this example to your hosting, the only thing that will be different for you is the Cron scheduler panel in the hosting web interface.

Ready? Then let’s get started!

We tried to briefly describe the path that the Timeweb team has traveled over 10 years: from rsync, LVM and DRBD to ZFS. This article will be useful for those who are engaged in server scalable infrastructure, plan to make backups and take care of the smooth operation of systems.

• rsync (remote synchronization)
• DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device)
• incremental backups under DRBD using LVM
• DRBD + ThinLVM
• ZFS (Zettabyte File System)

rsync and backups BC e.

rsync (remote synchronization)
— not at all about backups, strictly speaking. This is a program that allows you to synchronize files and directories in two places with minimal traffic. Synchronization can be performed for both local folders and remote servers.

Quite often, rsync is used for backups. We used this utility when the sites were simpler and there were significantly fewer clients.

Rsync did a good job, but the biggest problem here is speed. The program is very slow, it heavily loads the system. And with the increase in data, it starts to work even longer.

Rsync can be used as a backup technology, but for a very small amount of data.

LVM (logical volume manager) — logical volume manager

Of course, we wanted to make backups faster with less load, so we decided to try LVM. LVM allows you to take snapshots even using ext 4. Thus, we could make backups using an LVM snapshot.

This technology was used by us for a short time. Although the backup was faster than in rsync, it was always full. And we wanted to copy only the changes, so we switched to DRBD.

DRBD

DRBD allows you to synchronize data from one server to another. At what only changes, but not all data are synchronized. This greatly speeds up the process!

And on the storage side, we could use LVM and take snapshots. Such a system existed for a very long time and now exists on a part of the servers that we have not yet managed to transfer to the new system.

However, there is still a drawback with this method. During synchronization DRBD heavily loads the disk subsystem
. This means that the server will run slower. As a result, the backup interfered with the operation of the main services, that is, user sites. We even tried to make backups at night, but sometimes they simply did not have time to complete overnight. I had to maneuver, alternate backups. For example, one part of the servers is running today, then another. The backups were distributed in a checkerboard pattern.

DRBD, in addition, is highly dependent on network speed and affects the performance of the server from which and to which the backup is being made. We need to look for a new solution!

Thin LVM

At this point, the business challenged us to make 30-day backups, and we decided to switch to thinLVM. It didn’t solve the main problem! We did not even expect that such a high file system performance would be required to support thin snapshots. This experience was completely unfortunate, and we abandoned in favor of the usual thick LVM snapshots.

ThinLVM really just wasn’t designed for our purposes. Initially intended for small laptops and cameras, but not for hosting.

It was decided to try ZFS.

ZFS

ZFS
— a good file system that has a lot of already built-in goodies. What is achieved with ext 4 by installing on LVM, connecting a DRBD device, then with ZFS this is the default. The file system itself is very reliable. Separately, it is worth noting the Copy-on-write function, this technology allows you to handle data very carefully.

ZFS allows you to make snapshots that can be copied to storage, as well as automate backups. You don’t have to think of anything!

The transition to ZFS was very careful. First, we created a stand where we just tested for several months. In particular, they tried to reproduce problems with hardware, power, network, disk full. Through careful testing, we were able to find bottlenecks.

A sore subject of ZFS is disk overflow. We were able to solve this problem by reserving empty space. When the disk is full, steps will be taken to offload the server and clean up space.

After testing, we gradually began to introduce new servers, transfer old servers to ZFS. No more problems with backups! You can make 30- or 60-day backups, even backups every hour. In any case, the server will not experience excessive loads.

We collected all the data in the tables below to compare backups using different technologies.

What happened next?

There are plans to update ZFS to version 2 of OpenZFS 2.0.0.
in 2021. We are preparing the transition using all the features that were announced with the release in early December.

The Way this is!

This is the path we have chosen for ourselves! Do you solve similar problems? We will be glad if you share your experience in the comments! We hope the article turned out to be useful and if suddenly you also have the task of making backups using the built-in utilities in Linux, our story will help you choose the right solution.

Hello, friends! Today I’ll tell you how to backup a site and restore it from the control panel of TimeWeb hosting
. For reference, backup
translated from English — this is a backup, i.e. creating and saving copies of various data with the aim of their subsequent recovery in case of damage.

I’m sure that many of you are now thinking: well, how much you can write on this topic, this is already known to everyone. Believe me, not everyone. And even those who know all this often simply forget to back up their sites. Here you, for example, when was the last time you did a full backup of the site, honestly? Write about it in the comments to this article. Yes, I myself often forget about it, but once a week I definitely save the database. And I am writing this article for a reason, but there is an unpleasant reason.

How all my blog articles and pages disappeared

Blog backups are good, but I didn’t rush and decided to start by contacting the support team of my TimeWeb hosting. You never know what could have happened, maybe they screwed up there and are already fixing the mistake, or maybe my blog was hacked. In general, at 21:28 Moscow time, I wrote to technical support through the ticket system from the hosting admin panel. About an hour passed — no answer. The waiting time is up to 24 hours, you can’t fault it. But for me, you understand, I don’t want to wait — the blog is empty, but visitors come. I talked with Sasha Borisov and he advised me to write to them via online chat from the main page of the site, and not from the control panel.

The hosting employee, Karen Gevorgyan, immediately answered me in the chat and promised to transfer my application to the address. Literally 5 minutes later I receive a message:

I’m checking — everything is in order. I asked what was the reason for the disappearance of the content, to which I received an answer after a while:

Well, thanks for that! No, except for jokes, I want to express my gratitude to the hosting staff Karen Gevorgyan and Kirill Prokhorenko! In principle, after starting a dialogue with them, the site was restored quickly, within five minutes. Therefore, my advice to you, if they do not answer tickets, use the online chat
. And for this hint, special thanks to Alexander Borisov ()!

I wouldn’t have remembered this incident if I hadn’t seen in the emails the next day that I wasn’t the only one having similar problems with WordPress blogs on TimeWeb. Everything was successfully fixed there, too, but one of the messages made me think that the topic of backup, and in a simple way, creating a backup of the site, would be useful for many.

So, why you might need a backup of a website or blog
? I described one of the examples above. In general, there can be many reasons. Here are some of them:

• hosting failed;
• hackers messed up;
• installed a new theme (plugin) and the site crashed;
• edited template files and everything crashed.

There are many options for creating backups of a WordPress site and databases, from using plugins to downloading files from hosting manually via FTP. But, since a similar incident happened on TimeWeb hosting, I will show how to backup a site from the control panel on this hosting using the example of a Wodpress blog.

I must say that in 22 months of working with TimeWeb, this was my first contact with the support service. The issue of paying partner commissions, which can only be received by citizens of Russia, does not count. In addition, the hosting automatically backs up all the files and MySQL databases of our sites every day, and there is nothing to worry about. But, anything can happen and hosting is also not iron. It is better to play it safe and make backup copies of the site yourself in parallel.

There are two types of backups:

1. file system (pictures, themes, plugins, engine files);
2. MySQL databases (articles, pages, comments).

Keep in mind that all blog changes made since the last backup will be lost when the site is restored from backup
. Therefore, the more often you save copies of the site, the less you will need to restore in case of its loss. Even on hosting, there are several backup options.

Backing up site files and restoring them in BACKUP Management

Go to the hosting control panel. Here we will be interested in the two sections indicated in the figure.

Go to “” and open the tab ““. If you have several sites, then there will be folders with domain names in which the . Here we will copy it. If desired, you can save any directory or file by first opening them.

Hosting automatically makes and stores all copies for the last three days. To make a backup of the site files, select the date and click the ““ button. We confirm our intentions and wait until the backup copy of the folder is created. At the end of the copying process, the column “” will be marked ““, and an email will be sent to the mail with a message about creating a backup.

How to backup website files using File Manager

In the window that opens, you can specify the name of the archive and select its type. Click «» and save to a folder on your computer.

To restore a site from a hosting backup, click the “” button in the ““ section. All files will be restored to the date you have chosen.

How to backup mysql database and how to restore them on TimeWeb hosting

Then go to “” again and download the sql database archive, which looks something like this .

Believe that you need to back up your site as often as possible and you should not rely only on hosting
. With us, as long as the rooster does not peck, we do not move. But it’s better to spend a few minutes creating copies and sleep well than to lose your site. And this is the work of many years. Well, now, to be honest, write, when was the last time you backed up the site?