How to create a Backup in Plesk?
It’s always a good idea to make backups of your content. Backups prevent loss of your content in the case of disasters, and provide good examples of your sites and content that you can revert to. While some web hosts do keep internal backups of their customer sites in case of disasters, those backups are rotated and eventually overwritten. For this reason, you cannot depend on those backups to fulfill your individual backup needs.
Situations can and do arise where your internal backups will not help you and those web-host backups will not help you. This is where self-managed backups come in. Plesk gives you a backup manager tool that allows you to handle your backup needs how you see fit. This article will show you how to back up your site instantly, how to set up backups to occur on a schedule, and how to restore the backups you have.
How to Create an Instant Backup
Login to your Plesk account.
Click on Backup Manager
Click Back Up
In this section, there are options to include various data to be backed up. These include Domain configuration, which is always backed up, and can include or exclude Mail configurations, website files, user files, and databases.
Plesk does local backup automatically. To set up remote backup via FTP, click on this link for more instructions.
You can set Full Backup or Incremental Backup. Full backups can be restored on its own and include all of the data, while incremental ones only contain data since the last full backup.
You can adjust backup settings in the backup settings section to include comments and also specify files to be excluded, domains to be suspended, and email notifications to be sent upon completion.
Once you are ready to proceed, click on OK to begin backup.
You will see a green tick once backup is completed, and the date of the backup will also be displayed. A downward arrow will let you download the backup to your local machine.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, backups in Plesk are easy and record the most accurate safety net for your backups. With your Backup Manager, you have the option of making manual snapshots if that brings you peace, or you can make automated snapshots to save yourself the trouble, so your backups are always up to date.
Plesk’s flexibility means you can make your backups your choice. Full backups can provide you with your whole dataset, and Incremental backups can save you disk space. For optimal safety, always make sure to keep backups in other locations, like FTP, Google Drive, or Amazon S3, to avoid local disasters.
