Restoring Virtualmin domains and system

Say a machine dies, and, all hard drives are lost, RAID or not for the sake of argument. So, one must rebuild a system.

So, you load the OS, install Virtualmin using the installer. Presumably, you could then reload the Virtualmin backup one of course still has offsite.

So, what is missing if anything?

I can see if you loaded some more software via yum, say php from vmbleed, that would be missing, so there’s one thing.

Settings you may have overridden in /etc might be missing (say fcgid.conf), so, don’t forget that. Though there shouldn’t be many.

What else could be missing I am not thinking of?

Is there any missing step here?

Also, does a Virtualmin backup with all options selected also backup webmin, i.e., include everything a webmin full backup would also include?

Also, does a Virtualmin backup with all options selected also backup webmin, i.e., include everything a webmin full backup would also include?

No, and that might be what you’d be missing. But it depends on whether you’ve done anything custom in the Webmin configuration. Webmin is a little different than Virtualmin, in that it has very little meta-data. If you were to lose all of Webmin’s configuration, it probably wouldn’t ruin your day, because almost everything you do in Webmin is actually modifying system config files, and if you restored those relevant files Webmin will the reflect those differences. Of course, ACLs and other module configs that you may have changed would make a difference.

I make use of both the Filesystem Backup module, and the Virtualmin backup feature, on our systems. The Filesystem Backup module is used to backup everything on the system, and the Virtualmin backup feature is used to backup the virtual servers. This allows me to respond to varying levels of disaster with as little or as much restoration as needed, all the way up to restoring everything from backup.

However, realistically, if I were in a restore situation, I’d be recovering on an OS install from the hosting provider rather than bare metal, so I’d probably just be restoring a few bits of /etc (but not anything that Virtualmin touches, since it’d just get in the way), and everything else would come from Virtualmin backups. Almost everything would be from the Virtualmin backups.