I hate Plesk (Backup Hell)

Tue Nov 20 21:17:21 MST 2007

permit my ignorance and arrogance...why on earth would anyone want to go
through this?

Craig

On Tue, 2007-11-20 at 21:11 -0700, JD Austin wrote:
> Check out http://atomicrocketturtle.com  Scott has a great RPM 
> repository; I'm not sure if it goes that old though; likely not help you 
> currently.
> Plesk backup is a big pile of $... They got me with a BIG gotcha when my 
> hard drive crashed and they reimaged the server on a new drive.. backups 
> aren't compatible between versions.   I do an rsync mirror of my machine 
> every day.  The first time takes quite a while but the changes are done 
> in a few hours.
> 
> fouldragon at aol.com wrote:
> > Am I the only one who finds Plesk an utter and complete nightmare?  
> > They seem to ship it with bugs that projects that never escaped "1-Pre 
> > Alpha" on Freshmeat would be ashamed to!
> >
> >   
> Plesk is ok until you have to upgrade.. then you're stuck in rpm 
> dependency hell and end up doing
> rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps XXXX.rpm
> to get past 3 way dependencies that you can't fix.. in the end you're 
> stuck in a worse mess .
> 
> > I administer a reasonably servicable Fedora 4-based server with about 
> > sixty domains (many of which are just redirect hosting or abandoned 
> > clients)
> >   
> 
> Plesk EOL'd FC4 BTW.
> > It ran Plesk 8.0.0.
> >
> > I decided it would be good for security reasons to update to the most 
> > recent PHP and MySQL.
> >   
> I did that awhile ago using atomicrocketturtle.com's yum repository.  
> Now they are on 8.2.
> If anyone can get you from where you are to where you need to be it's 
> Scott and his repository.
> > Plesk 8.0 doesn't like MySQL 5 series.
> >
> > So I have to upgrade that to 8.1.1.
> >
> > Fine.  After two days of fighting, normality returns.
> >
> >   
> Been there :(
> > I've got the system set up to back itself up to an external FTP once a 
> > week.  It did this with the 'pleskbackup all' command.  This resulted 
> > in the generation of a ~15-20Gb file.
> >
> >   
> Their backup files are very weird.
> Fortunately with 8.0 you can tar and gz to get all your files back.
> It takes several passes.. I don't even want to mess with 8.1's backup 
> since it's totally different.
> > I don't have 20Gb of space anymore.  And apparently, you can't just 
> > 'pleskbackup all' to a FTP site with that version, despite the claims 
> > it was supposed to be fixed in 8.1.
> >
> >   
> Yeah.. they don't fix much or support much. There's more support from 
> their user forum than them.
> > For obvious reasons, I have no particular lust to update to 8.2, and 
> > open yet another Pandora's box (it feels like Pandora meets Deal or No 
> > Deal)
> >
> >   
> Yes it does.
> > So fine... I'll write a little shell script to do backups of single 
> > domains, FTP them over, and delete them. No single domain should be 
> > over 6Gb.  Seems simple.  (I try to use pleskbackup domains command).
> >
> >   
> I wouldn't even use their backup
> > So I test it out on a small domain.  pleskbackup runs fine, but when I 
> > do 'pleskrestore --create-map' using the resultant file, it dumps a 
> > stack of errors:
> >
> > Traceback (most recent call last):
> > File "/usr/local/psa/admin/share/supervisor/processor.py", line 83, in 
> > getStatus
> > return (None, self.realGetStatus())
> > File "/usr/local/psa/admin/share/supervisor/processor.py", line 413, in 
> > realGetStatus
> > info = dump_format.readInfo(fh)
> > File "/usr/local/psa/admin/lib/python/dump_format.py", line 399, in 
> > readInfo
> > xml.sax.parse(fp, i)
> > File "/usr/lib/python2.4/xml/sax/__init__.py", line 33, in parse
> > parser.parse(source)
> > File "/usr/lib/python2.4/xml/sax/expatreader.py", line 107, in parse
> > xmlreader.IncrementalParser.parse(self, source)
> > File "/usr/lib/python2.4/xml/sax/xmlreader.py", line 123, in parse
> > self.feed(buffer)
> > File "/usr/lib/python2.4/xml/sax/expatreader.py", line 211, in feed
> > self._err_handler.fatalError(exc)
> > File "/usr/lib/python2.4/xml/sax/handler.py", line 38, in fatalError
> > raise exception
> > SAXParseException: /var/backups/restore/dump-plesk.xml:11:33: not 
> > well-formed (invalid token)
> >
> > even 'pleskrestore --info' (tell me why the backup is busted) fails 
> > similarly (dump-plesk.xml at the end is replaced with <unknown> I 
> > think.)
> >
> > Pleskbackup reports no obvious errors, so I can't tell if it's 
> > pleskbackup making a borked file, or pleskrestore failing to parse a 
> > valid one.
> >
> > Of course, googling the errors gets me nowhere except a lot of other 
> > people complaining that Pleskbackup/Pleskrestore doesn't work well for 
> > them in many different ways.
> >
> > You'd think backup and restore are inherently things you test the crap 
> > out of prior to releasing a package like this.
> >
> > Has anyone got any thoughts as to what might be wrong?
> >
> > Alternatively, how else would you solve the problem:
> >
> > 1. I need to backup as completely as possible a Plesk-orchestrated 
> > server with 20-25Gb of data on it.  This includes email and databases, 
> > but I can forego logs.  I'd prefer to be able to suck back the Plesk 
> > configuration rather than have to reassemble it from scratch when 
> > rebuilt.
> >   
> If you can use rsync I would.. thats what I do.
> > 2. I have access to storage space via FTP only, and a total of 30G of 
> > space there.
> >   
> It's possible. There are perl modules that make ftping files pretty easy.
> > 3. I need a minimal (<10Gb at any one moment) disc-space footprint on 
> > the running server.
> >   
> Depends on what you're backing up. 
> > 4. It should be reasonably simple to reconstitute in the event of 
> > calamity.
> >   
> Theres the problem.. even with plesk backup GOOD LUCK.
> mysqldump, tar and gzip are your friend.
> I'm not sure how you'd back up mail /var/qmail/* and have it usable on 
> another non-plesk system.
> > 5. Ideally, it would not drive the load average to 87.
> >
> >   
> A lot of I/O will drive up your load.
> > Any thoughts?  Most of the answers I see involve "use pleskbackup all 
> > and FTP it over in some way", which fails because of part 3.
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