Backing Up and Restoration

With the data backup and restore functions provided by your Plesk, you can do the following:

• Back up the entire server.
• Back up individual user accounts with websites.
• Back up individual subscriptions (webspaces).
• Schedule backups.
• Restore data from backup archives.

The table below gives an overview of objects included in backups at various levels.

The table below lists objects and settings that are not included in backups at various levels.

Storing Backups

Backups can be stored in two places:

• The internal Plesk storage - a backup storage located on your Plesk server.
• An external FTP storage - a backup storage located on some external server in the Web or your local network. In this case, you should provide Plesk with the server's hostname and FTP user credentials.

Full and Incremental Backups

Plesk supports two types of backup:

• Full. Each time you create a backup, the backup includes all data regardless of the time when the data was last updated.
• Incremental. An incremental backup contains only data that was changed since the time of the last previously created backup.

  Using incremental backups significantly reduces the duration of a backup operation and the disk space occupied by backup files.

  Note: Plesk includes in incremental backups the data related to web, mail, and database hosting, but only web hosting data is backed up incrementally. In other words, only changes in data related to web are taken into account in incremental backups, while database and mail related data is included in full.

  Note that incremental backups contain whole files created on a subscription, not their parts. Plesk determines whether the data has been changed based on whole files. For this, Plesk uses an index file which is created for each backup at the time of backup creation. The index file lists all files which existed in a subscription, and information about them, such as size, modification date, permissions or owner. A full backup lists all files, while incremental can list just a few files that were changed. The listed files are those included into a backup.

  How Plesk determines whether to include a file into a backup:

  • The file was absent in the index for previous backups (full and incremental)
  • The file's size or modification time are different from those in the index for the previous backup
  • The file's permissions or owner are different.

Backups Created by Your Customers

Your customers granted with the permission to use the backup and restore facilities can back up and restore their own account settings and websites through the Customer Panel. Your customers, resellers and your resellers' customers will find shortcuts to their backup repositories in their Customer Panel (Websites & Domains > Backup Manager).

Plesk users are able see the role of a user who created a backup (administrator, customer, or reseller) in the backup tasks list (Tools & Settings > Backup Manager). This allows customers to differentiate between the backups they created by themselves and technical backups of their subscription. The technical backups happen when administrators or resellers back up customer subscriptions as a part of a larger backup. For example, when the Plesk administrator creates a server-level backup, all customer subscriptions are backed up as well, and they are displayed to the customers as subscription backups created by the administrator.

If a certain backup task fails, Plesk shows the detailed error description in a separate field of a backup task.

Creating Password-protected Backups

Starting from Plesk 11.0, you can secure sensitive data in your backups by using password protection. This makes it impossible for an attacker to access the backup data when the security of your external backup storage is compromised.

You can specify a backup password in the following circumstances:

• In your personal FTP storage settings (Websites & Domains > Backup Manager > FTP Storage Settings).
  
• When downloading a backup file from the Plesk internal storage to some external location.
  

When uploading these backups back to Plesk and restoring them, you will be prompted to provide the password that you used for protection.