EUKHOST - Offsite Backup Plans

[eUKhost]

Dear Customers,

Recently, there have been a few of our clients asking about our offsite data backup service. We have had these plans for quite a while now & we are glad to say it has proved to be beneficial to our customers.

Just to clear the confusions & doubts, I am listing the details here.

EUKHOST OFFSITE DATA BACKUP SERVICE

URL : http://www.eukhost.com/backup.php

There are four different plans available. The space allocations are 2GB, 5GB, 10GB & 20GB depending on the plan you want to go in for. The prices start at £ 12.00 Per Year for the lowest plan while the highest plan costs £80.00 per year.

All accounts are setup within 24 hours with full functionality.

[Notspot]

This service seems very good and a good price too, but I don't understand a couple of things.

When I tried to order it asked me for my domain and then said something about changing DNS nameservers. Why is this necessary? I thought this was just a backup stored elsewhere and wouldn't be 'online' as such.

If this is actually an online mirror of my website hosting doesn't that cause duplication issues?

Sorry to be a bit dense about it, but if you could clarify what it all means I'd be grateful.

[eUKhost]

This service seems very good and a good price too, but I don't understand a couple of things.

When I tried to order it asked me for my domain and then said something about changing DNS nameservers. Why is this necessary? I thought this was just a backup stored elsewhere and wouldn't be 'online' as such.

If this is actually an online mirror of my website hosting doesn't that cause duplication issues?

Sorry to be a bit dense about it, but if you could clarify what it all means I'd be grateful.

The domain name is being asked to link your backup plan to the existing modern bill account you have with us. This is done to have all your plans under the same billing account

[rickcj]

Hi All,

The link to the backup hosting account's appears to have disappeared from you site, i had to use this thread to find the link to them!

[eUKhost]

Hi All,

The link to the backup hosting account's appears to have disappeared from you site, i had to use this thread to find the link to them!

The direct link is here

On our home page if you scroll down to the bottom, you will be able to see a hyper link which says "BACKUP".

[Brian]

I have a few q's about it.

Can you schedule backups with the software ? What does it back up? THe whole account or just the www ? Does it backup databases ?

If I do schedules, can I have four seperate backups . IE, week one, week two, week three, week four etc. If so when the next week comes up can it overwrite week one, then the next week two etc.

[eUK-Martin]

I have a few q's about it.

Can you schedule backups with the software ? What does it back up? THe whole account or just the www ? Does it backup databases ?

If I do schedules, can I have four separate backups . IE, week one, week two, week three, week four etc. If so when the next week comes up can it overwrite week one, then the next week two etc.

Backups for Windows and Linux are scheduled to run with rSync and we can setup your backup script with all the option that you have mentioned above except having it run for every separate week. We run backups to have a copy of every week day or a separate copy for the date. In your case it will be every day of the month, e.g: it will over write the backup of 1-2-2008 with 1-3-2008 and so on..

[dik_]

Is there a demo of the management side we can see? Maybe some screenshots, even outside EUK if this is standard software? Can we configure backups etc ourselves any time we want? Can we select which dirs/tables to backup?

Thanks

[PHyndman]

I'm about to propose a system to one of my clients and I'm promising nightly backups as part of the package (based on the eUKHost backup offering) - I have a couple questions:

1) I'm only interested in backing up the contents of MS SQL Server DBs (the aspx pages can always be reloaded). Is this possible to do without taking the DB offline or would I need to script a DB backup job to provide a dumpfile for your backup utility (in which case is this possible with SQL Server Express?) ... or can you backup a live and attached SQL Server database?

2) I'm keen to setup a GFS backup rotation - is this possible? (wasn't sure whether Martin was saying that 2nd Jan backup gets overwritten by 3rd Jan backup or whether 1st Feb backup gets overwritten with 1st Mar backup .... I've been working with US dates and SQL Server for far too long!!!)

3) If I initially purchase the 5GB option I'm presuming that upgrading if required is easy, painless and quick? (also if I ever needed more than the 20GB option would this be possible ... although can't see that ever happening!)

Thanks in advance

[eUK-Martin]

1) I'm only interested in backing up the contents of MS SQL Server DBs (the aspx pages can always be reloaded). Is this possible to do without taking the DB offline or would I need to script a DB backup job to provide a dumpfile for your backup utility (in which case is this possible with SQL Server Express?) ... or can you backup a live and attached SQL Server database?

We can arrange the backup to run for one or many MSSQL database without bring the web site hosting down (however it may get a bit slow) and move them on the backup server. This is possible on any version of MSSQL server.

2) I'm keen to setup a GFS backup rotation - is this possible? (wasn't sure whether Martin was saying that 2nd Jan backup gets overwritten by 3rd Jan backup or whether 1st Feb backup gets overwritten with 1st Mar backup .... I've been working with US dates and SQL Server for far too long!!!)

Yes, it is very much possible to setup a GFS backup rotation.

3) If I initially purchase the 5GB option I'm presuming that upgrading if required is easy, painless and quick? (also if I ever needed more than the 20GB option would this be possible ... although can't see that ever happening!)

Upgrades are easy, you pay us the difference and we will increase your quota on the same account. However if you look to setup a GFS backup rotation then the space for 1GB data should be calculated as:

1x7 GB for weekdays backup.
1x4 GB for weekly backups
1x1 GB for monthly backups

Which will sum up to 12GB backup space. We can provide you backup space upto 500x4 GB

[eUK-Martin]

Is there a demo of the management side we can see? Maybe some screenshots, even outside EUK if this is standard software? Can we configure backups etc ourselves any time we want? Can we select which dirs/tables to backup?

Backups are manually configured using rSync. This is all handled by a script which we create as per the clients requirement. Currently we do not have any GUI application to provide a demo for. However if you can understand our scripts then you can make changes as per your need.

[PHyndman]

Thanks Martin - very detailed answer!

It's good to know I have that flexibility available (fortunately the client's DB only contains text and it'll be a long time before it even reaches 100MB let alone 1GB .. so while I've not sat down to calculate the space requirements the 5GB is likely to be ample to begin with ... I would probably want 6 monthly backups though).

I'll be putting the proposal to my client next week ... hopefully this will result in me purchasing a semi-dedicated server with the backup option ... watch this space!!!

Thanks again

[jazzy639]

Your "manual" scripts are not working. You moved me to a differnt backup server on Sunday 16/03/08 and since the 14th, no backups have commenced. Considering backups are an important issue I am very dissapointed. I have spoken to eUKHost on 3 separate ocasions now and its still not working.

[eUKhost.com]

Your "manual" scripts are not working. You moved me to a differnt backup server on Sunday 16/03/08 and since the 14th, no backups have commenced. Considering backups are an important issue I am very dissapointed. I have spoken to eUKHost on 3 separate ocasions now and its still not working.

Please let me know a ticket # or your domain name to locate your account information. I will get this sorted for you as we will need to allow IP of your new account on the backup server.

[jazzy639]

Please let me know a ticket # or your domain name to locate your account information. I will get this sorted for you as we will need to allow IP of your new account on the backup server.

Finally got it sorted last night, so all happy now!

[stevem]

Having also moved backup server there was one thing that I initially found confusing. The daily backup was working but the weekly backup didn't appear to work despite the weekly backup on the new server being a couple of weeks old.

But there is a simple explanation for this which I hope putting here will help others to see there won't be a problem.

The backup system WHM uses to check whether a daily, weekly or monthly backup is needed doesn't check the dates of the file on the backup server. What it does is create directories on its own server and looks at the dates of those. You'll find them at /home/cpbackuptmp/cpbackup.

So if it did a weekly backup yesterday to the old backup server, it won't do a weekly backup onto the new backup server until a week has gone by, no matter what the date of the files on the new backup server say.

So eventually it will all sort itself out, and as the old backup server is still around, in case of disaster the weekly and monthly backups are still available.

Hope this is useful.

[cbjroms]

Good morning all,

I have had an offisite backup plan in place for some months now.

This morning I found out that I could no longer access it and was told the following on LiveChat:

chris: Hi, I cannot access (via ftp) my backup location at64.38.53.18

Paul: The IP of the server has changed , please use 69.65.40.14 .

Why would this be changed, I wonder, and why was I not warned well in advance?

My second point is that the thread above refers to rSync. When I opened my backup plan I was told that this rSync could not be used with Windows and that backups would need to be scheduled in Plesk. This method has proved messy and unreliable - failing on a regular basis for no apparent reason. Does rSync provide a better option for me?

Chris

[jc8654]

Hi Chris,
I was under this migration as well and I got several days notice about it. Seems a bit odd... :-S

[eUKhost.com]

Good morning all,

I have had an offisite backup plan in place for some months now.

This morning I found out that I could no longer access it and was told the following on LiveChat:

chris: Hi, I cannot access (via ftp) my backup location at64.38.53.18

Paul: The IP of the server has changed , please use 69.65.40.14 .

Why would this be changed, I wonder, and why was I not warned well in advance?

My second point is that the thread above refers to rSync. When I opened my backup plan I was told that this rSync could not be used with Windows and that backups would need to be scheduled in Plesk. This method has proved messy and unreliable - failing on a regular basis for no apparent reason. Does rSync provide a better option for me?

Chris

Hello Chris,

I have requested one of our senior windows system admins to look into this and they will reply to this thread asap.

[cbjroms]

It looks as if the warning email that was sent missed me for some reason.

Anyway the real mystery is that Martin made it clear in the thread above that 'it is very much possible to setup a GFS backup rotation.'

Yet I have just received the following in an email from Gabriel S:

Regarding to GFS backup rotation, differential backups are performed six days a week.On the seventh day of the week, a full backup is performed.These are nothing but the daily and weekly backups.The last full backup performed each month is considered the monthly backup. The GFS backup can be implemented by scripting only and not with Plesk backup utility. So its not possible to schedule GFS backup for your account.

I find it difficult to understand how this can be both very much possible and similarly not possible.

Chris