Scheduling backups overview

A scheduled backup automatically invokes a full backup at the scheduled date and time. A full backup backs up all the files for the chosen type of backup, not only the files that have changed. Scheduling backups frees up your staff to attend to other tasks and saves the inconvenience of regular manual backups.

A full backup can be scheduled for:

- Appliance

- Reseller (if available)

- Site

- Important: Ensure that the target server has enough disk space, failing which, the backup will terminate.

- Note: If you back up the appliance, reseller and site files into the same backup directory, selecting necessary files when you want to restore is daunting, as during restore, all the backed up files are simply listed without clear demarcation as to the type of backup each compressed file belongs to.
  It is recommended that you back them up in different backup directories, to quickly identify the files you want to restore.
  For example, you could back up the appliance to an appliance_backup directory, back up the reseller to a reseller_backup directory and back up sites to a site_backup directory, instead of backing them all up in one common directory, say, WEBppliance_backup.

# Backup pre-requisites

Ensure you have fulfilled the following requirements:

- The name of the FTP server on which you want to save your data

- Your FTP login user name and password to log onto the FTP server

- The directory path of the backup directory on the FTP server

- Maximum size (in Megabytes or Gigabytes) of the backup file

- Important: Various file systems and FTP server utilities have limits on the file size they can handle. If the size of your backup file exceeds the file management threshold of the file system or the FTP server utility on your backup server, then WEBppliance splits the file into multiple files before continuing with the backup.
  The split files follow the naming convention as given below:
  <backupfilename.tar.gz>
  <backupfilename.1.tar.gz>
  <backupfilename.2.tar.gz>
  where backupfilename is the name of your backup file.

# Planning a backup schedule

A full backup consumes time and disk space. When you back up data, the existing archive is not overwritten; a new backup (in tar or gz format) is written to your backup server.

It is important that you schedule the backup at a time of low user traffic.

- Important: While the appliance and the sites hosted on the appliance will be accessible during a backup, it must be noted that modifications to files or email messages received during this period may not be backed up.

A backup can be scheduled daily, weekly or monthly. Frequency of changes to a file is a good indicator of how often you need to back up the file. If the frequency of data revisions is high, then a backup must be scheduled daily, so that loss of data is minimal.

# Confirming successful backup

If the files are backed up successfully to the backup server, you will receive a mail notification to that effect. The mail is sent to the email address specified at the time of scheduling the backup.