HI, am using the Virtualmin built-in Backup System for all virtual servers/domains…
Am using a load and lot of databases, esp. with Wordpress. I read that many backup system often have issues with (mysql/mariadb-)database backup & restoration.
What are your experiences, hints and suggestion to make backups a secure way for my 36 domains??
Thanks a million
Dan
Hi,
Considering the latest patches to MySQL library, it should handle MySQL/MariaDB difference and most importantly version difference quite well, and way better than before (will be included to Virtualmin 6.13). You could update mentioned file, restart Webmin and give your backups a try.
It’s recommended to make sure that MySQL root password is set and working. The easiest way to do so, is to re-run Post-install Wizard and re-setup MySQL root password there (it will not be required after Virtualmin 6.13 release).
Hi Ilia,
thank you so much… will give it a try…when is 6.13 expected?
and… how can I backup “root” stuff, meaning all the stuff not in virtual domains?
Thx a million
Dan
What do you mean by this? 
HI Ilia, thx for your help!
As I understand it, on my server there are X domains/virtual servers, which I can backup with the aforementioned system.
But there is also a folder root etc, with all the “meta” stuff, openvpn, root files etc… this wouldn’t be covered by any virtual server …
All the root server installations, BIND, OpenVPN, apache - not sure etc, the backup system itself, all server settings IP etc etc … how do I backup this??
THx a million
Dan
thx Ilia!!
Dan
I’ve found the webmin database backup system to be quite lacking. I typically end up using PHP My Admin to do the DB dump and need to automate it. Right now just doing it as part of my daily admin of my instance.
HI GPZs,
thank you for chiming in…what issues are you facing? I do not have the time to do 40 MariaDB datbases dumps each week 
THx
Dan
Hey @Ilia can you paste those “Other listed files” in a reply for me? I’m just setting up my scheduled backups and would like to get those included. Thanks.
That file list is custom. Let me share more or the less common, additional targets to include to a backup, which may work for you and others as well:
/etc/my.cnf.d
/etc/opendkim
/etc/opendkim.conf
/etc/pki
/etc/skel
/etc/sysconfig
/etc/usermin
/etc/webmin
/etc/yum.repos.d
/root/.config
/root/.gnupg
/root/.local
/root/.ssh
/root/.bash_history
/root/.bash_logout
/root/.bash_profile
/root/.bashrc
/root/.cshrc
/usr/local/bin
/usr/local/sbin
Hey @Ilia , can you share your fail2ban jail.local with me? I’m trying to get a better schema going. Thanks!
I could if I used Fail2Ban but I use ConfigServer Security & Firewall. It saves me more time, effectively doing pretty much the same.
Interesting, thanks for that. I’ll take a peak at it.
It seems when I use WBN/VMN do to it, the DB’s aren’t complete. I would imagine I’m doing something incorrectly (most likely), so for the time being I just export them all via phpMyAdmin and know that I have 100% of all the DB’s.
I use backupninja to do the DB’s, and use Vitualmin’s vhost backups for everything else.
backupninja is the bees knees, if you’re not using it you have no idea what you’re missing.
I recently tested restoring some Virtualmin backups just to make sure they work. I created a couple of virtual machines on my desktop (one CentOS and one Ubuntu), installed webmin and virtualmin the usual way and then restored some virtualmin backups (of individual sites) and everything looks fine, including mail accounts.
What did NOT work well was restoring webmin configuration files (using Webmin > Backup Configuration Files > Restore) at the server level. That’s not surprising for various reasons but the lesson to learn is that this type of backup shouldn’t be restored unless you really have to. They’re fine for recovering from an accidental misconfiguration but not for migrating from one server to another or restoring to a new server.
I use automysqlbackup (in addition to Virtualmin backups) to backup database contents to the server. It works well and on Ubuntu is installed simply using “sudo apt install automysqlbackup”, no configuration needed.
The advantage is that these backups (which are in plain SQL text format, rotated daily weekly and monthly) can then be backed up along with website source files to cheap external storage such as a NAS or OneDrive.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.