Alternative backups for cPanel server

Data security has always been a headache for us. Unpredictable loss of data will mess up most of the things related to our business, educational works, personal works etc… Data loss can occur due to buggy software, data corruption, hardware failure, malicious hacking, user error etc… So taking frequent backup of our data is always a good practice. Try to schedule taking full data backup that should occur at least once a week, often during weekends or off-business hours.

In web hosting business, cPanel is the best and most-used web panel around. In cPanel, there are so many other backup options available which is free and paid. Each customer has different needs. Some of them need space saver backups, some of them need server load reducing backups, some of them needs an easy user interface. Let’s discuss some of the backup options that are available nowadays which satisfy above customer needs. We will provide a brief note on the alternative backups available for cPanel.

R1Soft Backup solution

R1Soft backup plugin is a popular alternative backup solution in cPanel. It will work on both Linux and Windows server platforms. R1soft is highly customizable. We can customize the retention period of backup to keep hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly. We can restore the entire server backup or we can restore individual files we want. This options will make R1Soft a highly customizable backup solution.

At first, R1Soft takes the entire backup of the whole data. And then it will check the system’s block-level changes at scheduled intervals and when the backup runs next time, the process will sync only the changes that made on the server. So we can call R1Soft an incremental backup solution.

R1soft provides these useful and powerful options and it is also a bit expensive.

Restore Manager

Restore Manager is also a good solution for backup and restoring of your cPanel accounts. The restore manager allows you to take backup locally and remotely. Actually, local backups are pointless. Because, if your server got crashed or if a hacker got root access on your server, the backup stored on your server can be easily get lost. So storing backup files on a remote server will be a smarter and reliable option. Restore Manager have R1soft like ability to take incremental backups(take backup of only changed files). Which can be done remotely.

It also has the ability to restore individual files instead of restoring the entire backup. There is an option to restore Mail Forwarders, Domain Aliases, DNS Records, Databases, Emails, Cron Jobs and SSL Data. Restore manager is considered as a cheap backup solution.

JetBackup

Jetbackup provides more features than R1soft and restore manager does. It is a leading cPanel plugin. Jetbackup provides incremental backup using hardlinks remote and locally which will reduce server space usage. They call it “Point-in-time incremental backups.” Backups can be scheduled to multiple remote locations. Jetbackup provides features similar features of Restore manager like Full account restore, Single file restore, Download files/backups, Restore Emails, Restore Database, Restore Cron jobs, Restore SSL Certificates

It provides native cloudlinux support. We can add backup process inside the LVE. It will be bit slower but the backup process will not affect the server load. Backup process can also be optimized with rsync’s IO limit. This feature can be useful for a customer who does not have cloudlinux.

Bacula4Hosts

Bacula4hosts backup solution is an open source software. Which makes it more flexible to users. It provides a scripting language that allows you to customize your backup. Bacula4hosts is compatible with both Linux and Windows servers. Bacula4hosts is able to run multiple backup at a time. With the help of this feature, you can run multiple backups without waiting one to complete. This backup solution is able to handle more than one DBMS (Database Management System). It can handle MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. This backup solution is mainly focused to web hosting service providers and ISP’s. Bacula4hosts can be also used in shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS servers, Cloud Servers or Dedicated/Colocation services.

cPremote

cPremote is actually a WHM plugin that allows you to take incremental, compressed and uncompressed backups to remote destinations. The main feature of this backup solution is that it will not use gzip compression. This will help to reduce server load. cPremote allows us to restore the entire backup, individual files, emails accounts, domains, document root etc… from daily,monthly and weekly backups. cPremote is also cheaper than others. This will be helpful for most of the users.

Idera Server Backup Manager

Idera Server Backup Manager is a good backup solution for the servers. It is also fast and reliable. This backup solution uses a different backup technology called Virtual Full Backup instead of taking full, incremental or differential backups. It only stores the disk blocks that have changed recently. Unique disk blocks are stored only once. This will help to save the disk space. A database called a Disk Safe is used to keep track of these blocks and identify which blocks constitute a given recovery point.

Idera Server Backup Manager is able to work on both Linux and Windows servers. We can also use Idera Server Backup Manager for taking backup of virtual machines such as VMware, Hyper-V, Citrix Xen and other hypervisors.

Conclusion

So we have discussed some of the common backup solutions used in cPanel which is cheap and premium level. This blog discusses most of the customer needs related to backup. Hope this article will help some people to get a good idea about the backup solution and to choose between them according to their business needs. If so, consider sharing this blog. That might help others like you.

We do provide dirvish based managed backup services and you can get more details from the below links 

https://www.nixtree.com/managed-backup

Features

• Daily Full Disk Backup
• Backup Retention, according to your requirement
• Database backups taken separately for easily restore
• FTP and Rsync access to backups
• Backups of configuration of accounts for cPanel servers
• Restoration is easy for single file or multiple files.
• Notification of backups with the completion status
• Separate Compressed Mysql database Dumps ran on every night and will get synced those as well.