Even More Safety With Local, Remote FTP and Cloud Storage Backups
Backups are stored by default on the same host where your website is located. The advantage is that backups and restores are very fast there. But to ensure maximum security for your data, Plesk also works with other locations. You can store backups to any external FTP location (using an encrypted transfer method, of course, which is also included for free out of the box). This also works in addition to local backups, so you can get both, internal and external backups at the same time.
In backup sets, service passwords such as mailbox passwords are encrypted with a key of your choice for even more security. For most users this is already sufficient, but if transport-layer security and encryption of the service passwords in the Plesk database are not enough for you, simply increase security even more by storing backups with the cloud providers supported by Plesk. Because there the complete files are stored encrypted again.
Doing cloud backups is as easy as doing FTP backups. Numerous extensions can let you back up to Google Drive, Amazon S3, Digital Ocean Spaces, Microsoft One Drive (depending on the provider, there may be a cost for this, the list names just a few popular extensions, but there are more). For web professionals and hosting companies it is recommended to use the “Backup to Cloud Pro” extension for even more flexibility. The “Backup to Cloud Pro” license pack gives you access to the premium features of Amazon S3, Google Drive, DropBox, DigitalOcean Spaces, Microsoft OneDrive, and SFTP Backup all in one. It is a perfect choice.
Too Good to be True?
We all know that sometimes even the best backup is not a perfect match for the intended purpose. Many users expect a backup to restore not only website content, mailboxes, databases and Plesk configuration, but the entire server including the operating system. This overwhelms even a sophisticated yet user-friendly backup system like Plesk Backup.
Backing up the entire operating system requires costly shadow copies (and a corresponding amount of disk capacity and processing power or RAM) and poses the greatest challenges to data integrity on servers that have to handle a very large number of transactions. This is because a perfect snapshot of the entire system must be created at the time of backup. Only then can the system state at time X be restored so that all configurations, services and data have integrity and match exactly as they did before the backup. To achieve this, other methods are better suited, for example snapshot backups of the virtual machine (if the virtualization supports this). However, the disadvantage of such backups is that parts of them cannot be restored selectively, or only with great effort. Therefore, they should rather be seen as an additional security option.
For daily operation and convenient, continuous data backup, as well as very simple, selective or complete restoration of important content such as e-mails, databases, files and websites, as well as configurations, Plesk Backup Manager is the right choice.
Conclusion
- You should always have an up-to-date backup before updates.
- With the built-in Plesk Backup Manager, backups can be created manually or fully automatically on a regular basis in the background in no time.
- Restoration is possible not only for the entire backup, but also for individual parts of it, e.g. databases, mailboxes, files and folders or websites.
- Plesk Backup Manager can store backups on the local host, but also on FTP(S) locations and – with extensions – on cloud services.
- Plesk Backup is included in all Plesk licenses.
