Scheduling backups overview

A scheduled backup automatically invokes a full backup at the scheduled date and time. A full backup backs up all the files for the chosen type of backup, not only the files that have changed. Scheduling backups frees up your staff to attend to other tasks and saves the inconvenience of remembering to invoke regular manual backups.

A full backup can be scheduled for:   

• Reseller data

• Site data

• Important: Ensure that the target server has enough disk space, failing which, the backup will terminate.

Backup Pre-requisites

Ensure you have fulfilled the following requirements:

• The name of the FTP server on which you want to save your data

• Your FTP login user name and password to log onto the FTP server

• The full directory path of the backup directory on the FTP server

• Maximum size (in Megabytes or Gigabytes) of the backup file

• Important: Various file systems and FTP server utilities have limits on the file size they can handle. If the file system or the FTP server utility of your backup server can not handle the file size mentioned in the Maximum Backup File Size field, then WEBppliance splits the file into multiple files before continuing with the backup.  
  
  The split files follow the naming convention given below:
  <backupfilename.tar>
  <backupfilename.1.tar>
  <backupfilename.2.tar>

Planning a backup schedule

A full backup consumes considerable disk space. When you back up data, the existing archive is not overwritten; a new backup (in tar or tgz format) is written to your backup server.

It is important that you schedule the backup at a time of low user traffic.

• Note: The appliance and the sites hosted on the appliance will be accessible even as the backup is in progress. But certain anomalies may occur, for instance, if additional mail is delivered at the time of backup, and the backup process has already archived the mails, then the new mails will not be backed up until the next backup.

A backup can be scheduled daily, weekly or monthly. The frequency of changes to information is a good indicator of how often you need to back up information. If the frequency of data revisions is high, then a backup must be scheduled daily, so that loss of data is minimal.

Confirming successful backup

If the files are backed up successfully to the backup server, you will receive a mail notification to that effect. The mail is sent to the email address specified at the time of scheduling the backup.