Backups

Over time, you will put quite a bit of work into the exact configuration of your hosts and services, limits, notifications and so on — so you should make backups. This is not only useful in case something goes wrong, but also for testing or using different configurations. You can back up the complete configuration and restore it if necessary. Backups can be scheduled, encrypted and compressed.

You can access the creation of backups in Setup > Maintenance > Backups.

In the first step, switch to the list of backup targets on the Site backup page with the Backup targets action button and create a new target with Add target:

The absolute path specification under Destination refers to the system, not the site.

Once you have saved the backup target, go back to the Site backup page. Open the list of backup keys with Backup encryption keys and create a new key for your backups with Add key with a meaningful name and a secure password (passphrase):

After creating the key, you will see a message telling you that you have not downloaded the keys yet:

You can download the key in PEM format using the Download this key button. By the way, you also have to enter the passphrase of the key when downloading. Since you need these keys to restore backups, the message will remain until all keys have been saved.

Note: If a backup key should ever no longer be available, you can upload the backed-up key again. You must also enter the passphrase before uploading.

Now you can create a new backup job — again on the Site backup page, this time using the Add job button:

Here you can select, among other things, the items you just created under Target and Encryption. You will also find options for compression and scheduling backups. As you will soon see, you can also trigger backups manually. With Do not backup historical data you can save metrics (RRD files), monitoring history and log files, which results in significantly smaller backup archives.

On the Site backup page you can now see your finished backup job and can start it via :

You can stop running backups with :

Finally, you will see a confirmation that the backup has completed:

For both running and completed jobs, takes you to the details for the job.

You can start restoring backups on the Site backup page by clicking on Restore. The procedure is largely self-explanatory:

After restoring, the site will be restarted, so you temporarily see an HTTP 503 error message:

As soon as the site is available again, you will get the details on the result:

Finally, confirm the restore by clicking Complete the restore.