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Complete backup/restore of VPS?
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Complete backup/restore of VPS?

ultrakommultrakomm Member
edited November 2012 in Help

Hi!

I'm wondering if it's possible to somehow create a complete backup of a VPS and then restore it? Something creating a tarball of the complete filesystem, and then downloading it on the VPS and extracting it and replacing all files when you need to restore?

Is this possible?

Comments

  • LeeLee Veteran

    For me I rsync all my vps's to a bqinternet.com, keeps them safe and it's easy to get them back in the event of a failure or if I change provider.

  • Would it be possible to rsync it to my server at home? I run no critical VPS anyway. I just don't like the idea of having to reconfigure everything from the beginning everytime I change provider or something goes wrong.

    Does anyone know a tutorial or something for doing this with rsync? :)

  • Not sure about other providers but we have two ways to make backups. Quick backup stores it locally for ftp, rsync transfer. Central backup creates and stores it on a seperate server and can be restored on demand.

  • If you have a Linux system at home, you can try BackupPC. It has a nice working web interface and can use rsync to backup and restore files, so there is no special client software (except for rsync...) needed.

    Also it has deduplication, which saves you space (especially on the full backups) and rsync is a bit friendlier on the network bandwidth in comparison to downloading a new tarball every day.

  • XSXXSX Member, Host Rep

    use rsync is best.

  • @ultrakomm said: Is this possible?

    Nothing is impossible, but something is likely to go wrong. To start with, the new VPS will (likely) have a different IP address -- so doing a blanket replace of all config files with those from a backup will likely screw up something, maybe many things.

    Here's a suggestion: take notes. With a good set of notes and an independent backup of service configurations (which you can selectively restore as appropriate) you can have a replacement VPS online and functioning in a very short time.

  • @ultrakomm haven't used it so no first hand experience, but heard good things about blueprint for reverse engineering system configs (part of what you need):
    https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint

  • Not tried that Blueprint myself but been watching it, isn't that from one of the co-founders of Slicehost?

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