Shells backup

We make full backups of all the home directories and databases to an off-site server every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 5:40am local time.

File backups

To restore a file from this backup to your account you can use the backup command. You can also use the same command to back up a file at any time.

Usage:

backup -r /home/username/file.txt restores file.txt to the version found in the backup. (option -r is the same as --restore)

backup -b /home/username/file.txt saves file.txt to the backup server. (option -b is the same as --backup)

If you want to check the last date and time a backup was made, you can check at the backup webinterface.

Known bugs:

Filenames with spaces aren't handled properly yet. They are backed up in the periodical backups, but they can't be restored automatically. If you need such a file restored please ask one of our staff members to restore it manually.

When working with restoring a directory make sure to include a trailing / to ensure the restored folder is created properly.

backup -r /home/user/directoryname/

MySQL database backups

Though we do include the MySQL databases in our backups, you can not restore them manually (due to file permissions etc.) Should you need this feature, or do you want to keep extra backups of your databases for whichever other reason, you can create a cronjob to do so.

user@Lydia:~$ crontab -e

This will open up your crontab for editing. Add the following command to make a daily backup of your database.

@daily mysqldump -u username -pmysqlpassword databasename > backupfile.sql

Obviously you need to replace the username, password, database and backupfile.sql with the ones you use. Make sure to include the full path in the backup file name. (/home/username/mybackup/database.sql).

There is no space between -p and your password!

You can also add the backup command trough your usermin under Others -> Scheduled Cron Jobs -> Create a new scheduled cron job.

You do not need to add the @daily to the command if you do it through usermin. The timing of when the backups are made can be specified on the Cron Job creation page.