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Restore from remote backups

DanH42 shared this idea 10 years ago
In Progress

I'd like to be able to store a week's worth of backups for all users, but space on the web server is limited and storing nearly 7x the data on the drive isn't really an option, so we store backups in Amazon S3 and don't keep them locally.


It would be nice if there were a way within WHM to automatically retrieve a remote backup archive, restore from it as needed, then remove the local copy when done. If WHM already has connection information to save backups to a remote destination, recalling those backups should be fairly simple. In my case I'm using S3, but this should be just as easy with FTP, WebDAV SFTP, etc.


In the meantime, I'm using a script to pull down the remote backup and put it back into its original folder so I can restore an account through WHM, but having to log in via SSH shouldn't be necessary.

Best Answer
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Thank you for your feedback! Remote Restore went into v80 for the FTP transport. So that is available in all versions 80 and above. We are currently evaluating other transports for Remote Restore, but there is not a current timeline on those actions.

Replies (37)

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The import export remote backup is a basic feature that should be available...


In the documentation, it is said we should download our backup to our computer and then send them back to the server on which we want applied backup. For me, it's impossible, my upload speed is too low, and my FTP disk is accessible only by the server for security. Maybe an alternative would be to offer an application like file manager that would work as an FTP client. So that we can manage at least a remote ftp from cpanel...

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This would be in one of the more important features I could hope for. I went to SFTP after being told via sales that the feature was already available. Having gone to an SSD cloud where IO is at a premium, having large storage for local backups is not a cost effective option, so I built a backup server with cost effective HDD giving me plenty of room for lots of backup retention, while dealing with an account restore is easy enough for me, I can SCP a file over, it is NOT easy for a majority of those I work with.

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Remote backup is a must, but we need to tool to restore both from remote ftp/sftp and from custom handler(we use it for openstack swift), It should be easy, cpanel has all the data, if feature is enabled, the cpanel user, can browse his remote backups, choose one and then download/restore it


This will greatly improve the self service features of the cpanel customer,

could be enabled by default from whm, by feature setting for reseller and cpanel accounts.


If will be possible to choose to restore only files in public_html/mail odr databases will be super nice.

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+1 to this. It would be silly not to add this feature. I have a 3TB NAS kept offsite which we use STTP to transfer backups to every night. It should be possible that cPanel keeps a record of the backups stored on that NAS unit then if someone requests a restore it downloads it to the server and begins the restore process.

The only other way I see this working is by mounting our NAS as a system drive. But I dont want to do that.

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+1 for this idea.


Currently, you have to make the S3 backup tar.gz file public, then SSH into the server and head into your home folder, then run a

  1. wget https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/backup/weekly/2017-04-16/domain.tar.gz

then, via WHM Home »Backup »Restore a Full Backup/cpmove File

Restore with Username

select /home/acctname.tar.gz

then restore...


just seem there would be an easy way to programmatically accomplish this...

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Even though you posted this 3 years ago, you just saved my life. From the bottom of my heart, thank you!

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No specific updates on this yet. With the work we've been doing in the backup system recently I'm hoping we'll see something to resolve this get added as well. As soon as I have more information I'll be back to let everyone know!

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2

With the progress with remote incremental backups, and the built-in ability to select a restore date already in the interface, being able to restore from the remote location would definitely be beneficial.

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4

+1 on this, now with the remote incremental backup this is a must.

Move cpfile.tar.gz files between servers is easy, but remote incremental backups does not create the archive, so you need to ssh to backup server, choose folder, create a .tar.gz file from desired folder, wait for archive to end (usually the backup servers have very few cpu and memory resources), move file to cpanel server, create the format BACKUPDIR/date/accounts, untar file, restore account, delete uncompressed folder on cPanel server, delete .tar.gz on cPanel server and delete .tar.gz from backup server... very annoying.

Now, having the benefit of the remote incremental backup where files are not stored in a .tar.gz archive there would be easy to retrieve/restore single files, full directories, mails, etc. from cPanel interface (by end-user).

The transfer tool is already done, this feature should work the same way that transfer tool does.

Remote incremental backups are the best thing, cPanel should have released this feature at the same time as incremental remote backups, since without this, restoring backups using incremental remote backups is now a problem.

This is something that 3rd party backup tools do for a very long time

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+1 for this feature request. I love the incremental backups but it makes me nervous about the pain I will go through if I need to restore from backups.

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The only reason we are not yet using incremental backups is because there's currently no automated way to restore from remote incremental backups. I hope the CP team can prioritize this.

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I'm loving the backups to google drive, but really feel it's needed to be able to restore from there too, for example, in the case of a need to restore all the accounts to a new server. Please benny@cpanel.net - can we push along?

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If CP team can not make a way to restore from remote incremental backups, remote backup utility is not make any sense. Restoring from remote sftp or google drive or amazon s3 is very tedious job. It create additional support hours for hosting provider if any of the customer is asking for restoring backup and which we have to provide them free of charge. So, if CP team prioritize this feature will make backup and restoration process a perfect utility.

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+500 We could imagine for this, as only imagining about 500 servers that want to do this, we should be able to leverage these 3rd party APIs such as AWS, Google Drive and etc... :) Thanks in advance!

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Hi all! there's not been any movement on this yet. For now, you will still need to manually copy the backup to the local server before we can restore the backup.

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After rightly being chastised by you in a cPanel seminar for not turning on my backups (and coming home and enabling external backups to my B2 account), I discovered today that sure enough, you can't easily restore from external sources like B2 (thankfully I was just exploring and didn't need to do it). Anyway, At the least, I'd love to see a way to securely pull stuff BACK from the external (especially if they aren't incremental). It could show the list, let you select one, check to see if there's room to pull it back, if so, pull it back and then start the restore.

Obviously there's more to this or it would be a feature already, but I do really hope they can make this work soon.

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+500 a definite must to be abe able to restore from external backups i.e G drive. ATM its all a manul process and doing this for multiple servers and sites is a very tedious job. Currently using a 3rd party plugin: Jet backup which works well but our prefernce would be something directly integrated into whm/cpanel. Not only wil it save us some costs but not have to rely on 3rd party plugins to do a job that should be native to whm/cpenal.

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I don't have the storage to retain local backups, so those random times we need to pull down an account from S3 and restore it is cumbersome. Which means, effectively, I'm the only person that does it. When the backup exists at multiple destinations you might have a selection for: 'First available' then list out the destinations. If 'First available' is selected then it provides a fail-over path if there's issues transferring the file back.

Providing the option to restore regardless of where the backup is stored would be ideal for us.

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This would be useful when used with Wasabi or StorageSpider!

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Thanks for the update cPanelTabby. Looking forward to being able to use SFTP or FTPS which is better for security/GDPR. JetBackup is excellent and I use it for many servers, but for some small setups, JetBackup can be overkill. If can just get FTP and SFTP (or at least FTPS) with remote restores and without the backups having to also be hosted locally for it to work then that would be great.

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Does this work with incremental backups?

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No, only FTP. Incremental does not work with FTP transport. For incremental to work, Rsync transport needs to be used.

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4

Is there any plan to restore backups from Amazon S3 or better from backblaze?

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A backup is simply not a backup if you can't restore it. :(

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@CpanelTabby - Thank you x500 for bringing this to light about the current status of this. So, as I see it, it's only FTP for now, anything though on the roadmap for the other methods since we're personally and mainly on Cloud services such as Google. :)

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4

How about adding support to restore from "another local folder" ?It seems to me that this one would be the most simple to implement :)

I (ab)use this option to directly sync files via sshfs and nfs mounted locally using autofs.

I also tried storing the backups directly on the mount points which totally works and makes them available for restore.

The only major downside of this is that the backup is also created on the mount point resulting in 1,5x the data being sent back and forth. Being able to specify a separate temp folder where it builds the archive would overcome this.

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Glad to see this is in progress!

I was about to request that backup to additional destinations do not follow the same retention settings for local backup (we'd like to have 1 daily local backup retained on WHM server, but retain all backups on our B2 additional destination), but this would solve that.

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Hi,

This has been in progress for a long time if I am not wrong

Is there any news? It will be a great notice if we get this in the next version

Thanks in advance

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I am happy to see this feature in progress!

I look forward to restoring copies from B2 on my server.

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When can we expect to be able to restore from Google Drive?

In particular, I'd like to be able to restore multiple accounts to a new server from Drive.

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This post is from 6 years ago, I really don`t see any progress and it's a pity because it's a fundamental and vital function: right now restoring a backup from an external source is a complicated procedure.

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I agree with Alessio. I don't see cpanel implementing this on a near future. Its basic and it hasn't been done so far... dont know why they would implement it now. It's sad but true.

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4

A ping to keep this 6-year old topic alive. If Cpanel can mount an external drive to backup it should be able to mount to restore. I'm an S3 backup user.

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A backup is not a backup if you can't restore it. I did not need to be a computer developer to create the backup, please don't make me be one to restore it. Amazon S3 user.

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I just went through restoring a backup from S3 if you need help. It was pretty easy after reading through these posts.

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+ 1 that we will really appreciate this convenient feature

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Is there any news about this feature? It is completely necessary. In addition, Backblaze is now also S3, it is possible to connect via ftp, so I don't see the reason why I can't restore a backup from Backblaze.

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Thank you for your feedback! Remote Restore went into v80 for the FTP transport. So that is available in all versions 80 and above. We are currently evaluating other transports for Remote Restore, but there is not a current timeline on those actions.

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Merged new feature request with existing feature request.

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Wished this was available, would make cPanel a lot more attractive.

Remote incremental backups to providers, allowing us to restore accounts, files or database from the UI if needed.

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Is Remote Restore for incremental backups planned?

thanks.

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Any news on being able to restore from a remote location? it is surely such an easy thing to implement that should be basic.

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Considering how EXPENSIVE cPanel is compared to other control panels, it would be nice to have this basic remote backup functionality included within it. Sure we can backup, but then your backups are stranded on a remote server. In times of an emergency restore, we need to fumble around with SSH and SCP.

Or.... the cPanel solution is to use regular FTP? What year is this? FTP is not secure, at the least, they could include SFTP as well. Considering this request was put in almost a decade ago and there's hundreds of requests for it... please put this through in the next release. It's an important one for completing the backup system.

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