Parallels Plesk Panel 11 end-user series

23. How to use the backup manager in Plesk

Backups are an essential part of maintaining any website. It is important to create backups on a regular basis to prevent data loss in the event of a server crash.

1) Go to the websites & domains tab.

2) Click backup manager.

3) Click back up.

You cannot specify the file name for the backup, but you can add a prefix to help you find it later.

Optionally add descriptive text about this backup in the comments section.

4) Specify the volume size to create a multivolume backup.

By default, backups will be stored on the same server as your account. You could also perform a remote backup by choosing personal FTP repository. You'll need to set one up first in order for this option to become available; we'll show you how to do that in a moment.

5) Enter an e-mail address here to which a notification will be sent upon task completion.

6) Choose whether to back up just the configuration or both configuration and content.

7) Click back up.

Depending on the amount of data you have, this can take some time. While we wait, let's see how to create scheduled backups.

8) Go to scheduled backup settings.

9) Check this box to activate this task.

10) Choose how often this task should be performed; either daily, weekly or monthly.

11) Set the time and day of the week when this task should begin.

So, according to these settings, a backup will automatically be made every week starting at 05:17PM on Mondays.

12) Optionally add a prefix to the backup name.

13) Click ok.

The manual backup we made in the first part of this tutorial has finally finished and is shown here.

Now let's see how to set up a personal FTP repository so we can perform remote backups via FTP.

14) Click this link.

15) Enter the server's IP address or hostname.

16) Then type the username and password.

For security purposes, you can also password protect your backups. Note that if you forget the password, it cannot be recovered.

17) Click ok.

Now that we know how to create backups, let's learn how to restore them.

18) Click server repository.

19) Choose the backup file that should be restored.

20) Select the type of data to restore.

21) Optionally enter an e-mail where a notification will be sent upon task completion.

22) Click restore.

If there are any conflicts, they will show up here.

23) Click next.

24) Choose what to do with the conflicts; use configuration and data from the backup file, use the configuration from the current system and restore only the data from the backup, or do not restore any objects that have conflicts.

25) Click next.

The backup is being restored.

We have seen how to make and schedule backups for our account and websites and how to restore them. Let's quickly take a look at how to back up a single subscription.

26) Go to webspaces.

27) Choose the subscription you want to backup.

28) Click back up websites.

A few moments ago, we restored a backup, which has completed now, as you can see.

This looks exactly the same as the account-wide backup manager, but the tools available to us here are specific to the subscription we selected. This means the scheduled backup settings and personal FTP repository settings we just entered are separate and will not show up here.

29) Click back up.

You can choose whether to back up just the domain configuration or both configuration and content. Selecting the second option gives you the choice of including mail in the backup or excluding it.

30) Fill out all the options as we did previously.

This is the end of the tutorial. Now you know how to use the backup manager in Plesk.