Sysadmin Advice needed for backup strategy

For moving site data there's 2 general guides where the principles & steps of backing up and moving data is the same just slightly different for

1. Moving Centmin Mod site data to another Centmin Mod server
2. Moving cPanel/WHM site data to Centmin Mod server

Those guides move alot more than just the site(s) in question but config files etc. You can use your own best judgement as to the config files and whether you want to move them or just use the fresh server setup Centmin Mod config files as they get auto optimised for the server Centmin Mod initially installed on.

If your old site isn't centmin mod or cpanel/whm based, then those guides won't be 100% applicable. But the general overview of what needs moving and where everything is structured in Centmin Mod LEMP environment is worth reading up on.

Also official site configuration files page explains the Centmin Mod structure of where the important files are so you can decide on what to backup.

Manual commands can be just scripted if you learn shell/bash scripting. For example most of the commands in the 2 moving guides I linked to can eventually be scripted to be automated if you know what you're doing. So it eventually isn't about manual vs automated, but whether you understand the commands used to backup and restore your data and then scripting it.

Some discussions related to this

• Sysadmin - Backup files and database script
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• Create a folder by date and then backup inside script.sh
• Backup also permissions of files and folders
• Creating bash script to backup files from several directories
• Sysadmin - Simple Database Backup script with pushover and email notifications
• Sysadmin - Sysadmin Backup tip of the day - remember which is source and destination !
• Sysadmin - Faster & smaller compressed file backups with tar + zstd compression
• Fastest way to migrate 15gb+ database to remote server?
• Backup File Bash Script
• CMM Backup Script

 

Looks interesting

Depends on how valuable you data is to you. I backup file and database data depending on how valuable the data is. As it's non-commercial, I usually backup with my own custom written scripts every 3-8hrs depending on the data and backup a local server copy + send them off to remote Amazon S3 buckets. My Amazon S3 buckets storage has just surpassed 3TB (yes terabytes) at around US$55/month. Many folks don't realise, if you want regular and frequent highly available backups, it costs more $$$ and alot more server resources/servers than they maybe prepared to pay for

If it's very important data and/or commercial, then do a combination of backup methods and not just one with MySQL replication with multiple MySQL dedicated servers for master/slave and/or clustered MySQL servers (minimum need 3-5 servers) and large disk storage space capable of doing MySQL binary log backups via a dedicated binary log server for moment in time backups which can consume 100s of gigabytes of disk space. Along with fast MySQL backup tools via Percona Xtrabackup or MariaDB Backup tools i.e. Sysadmin - MariaDB backup tool question.

Centmin Mod premium forum members have access to dbbackup.sh for MySQL database backups too MariaDB - dbbackup.sh - quick mysql database backups for Centmin Mod stack which allows for

• MySQL database and schema only backups + /etc/my.cnf backup
• Multi-threaded parallel compression default pigz with options for lbzip2, pbzip2 and pxz. For single cpu core servers, falls back from pigz to gzip.
• Amazon S3 Storage support and option to define one of three S3 storage classes (Standard, Standard – IA, and Glacier) to control your Amazon S3 storage costs and Amazon S3 availability and durability. Disabled by default.
• Amazon S3 Upload Dry Run Mode support. Disabled by default.
• Remote FTP/SFTP support - can define up to 3 separate FTP/SFTP locations to remotely transfer your backups for added redundancy and data safeguard.Disabled by default.
• Backup Retention threshold set in days. Older than XX days deletion routine for both local backups and remote FTP/SFTP backups. Amazon S3 you can setup your own S3 bucket's lifecycle management in AWS Console. Example for retention threshold based deletion shown here.
• Email and Pushover.net mobile notification options on backup runs. Disabled by default.
• Persistent db-config.ini separate file option so custom settings survive dbbackup.sh script updates.
• Full backup run logging to log file for diagnostic troubleshooting or historic records
• Smarter per database character set and collation handling for backups to prevent database table corruption due to character set and mixed collations.

 

probably need to read the rsnapshot documentation and ask on their support platforms etc

You don't want rsnapshot anywhere directly accessing /var/lib/mysql unless you want to corrupt all your mysql data. While MySQL server is running, you shouldn't be directly touching the mysql data files in that directory outside of MySQL process/tools designed to properly and safely backup/restore that data.