Remote Transfer (System Backup) Does Not Transfer

Richard8

Verified User
Joined
Jul 4, 2019
Messages
73
Location
USA
I'm doing my very first full system backup to a remote location, and it appears everything went as planned except there's no remote copy of the backup and I'm trying to figure out why it didn't transfer.

Here's an overview of my setup on the latest DirectAdmin beta channel:

Basic Configuration is fairly default, plenty of space on the partition, I'm only backing up 2 or 3 websites (the whole test server).

Remote Transfer I have the following options set:

Use Remote Transfer
Remote transfer method: scp (I did not download the id_dsa.pub because I am using a password SSH/SCP)
Delete the local backup after remote transfer: Checked
Incremental file-by-file backup: Unchecked
Remote Host: backup1.serv.com (I can confirm my DNS works, the backup server is a basic Linux Kimsufi/OVH dedicated)
Remote User: directbackups
Remote Password: ****
Remote Path: /backups/directadmin

For the directbackups user, the full path (Remote Path) /backups/directadmin is that user's home directory on the remote host. I can login successfully with the backups user on the remote server via SSH/SCP. I can write/delete a file and permissions look good for that user.

Directories
Everything Unchecked

Files
Everything Unchecked

When I run a backup without the remote transfer, the backup completes on the local server without issues. I can go into a backup and see that it did everything just fine.

When I run a backup with remote transfer, it goes through the motions as normal, sends a message that it was successfully, and even the I go to the logs I can see where it looks like it tried to connect to remote server, but I don't see its connection on my remote server logs and there's no backup file.

Dumping database mysql: Completed
Dumping database performance_schema: Completed
Dumping database someapp_data: Completed
Performing backup transfer to backup1.serv.com: Completed
Performing cleanup operations: Completed


When I go to my DirectAdmin server, I can see in /backup that there's nothing there for today. The only thing is the single backup I did yesterday to test.

Somewhere in between backing up and deleting the local copy, something is missing where it thinks it connected to the remote backup location but didn't. I am digging through all my logs on the remote host, and I don't even see a login attempt or failed login.

What am I missing? Gotta be something really simple because I can watch the local backup process, and everything looks very clean and neat. Just need to get it to remote location. I could rig up a cron script to push the local backup manually, but if it supports remote destination built in, I should try and figure out what's wrong / what I did wrong.

Any thoughts? I'm looking for where DirectAdmin holds other logs so I can see what's going on since the backup progress log in Messages looks fine.

Thanks!
 
Additional Info:

The remote host's port is the default SSH port and I did not specify a port when I specified the hostname. I typed it "host.name.com" rather than "host.name.com:22" or "host.name.com:12345" -- not sure if that helps, since I didn't see an easy way to specify alternative port for SCP.
 
Though I have no a direct answer on your questions I can suggest that you try and debug the issue yourself.

For system backups an old 3rd party solution is used, it can be found under /usr/local/sysbk/ you can call it as /usr/local/sysbk/sysbk

It's written in shell so you can debug it with shell tools.
 
It turns out even when leaving the default port the same, it doesn't actually do the transfer after the backups complete and it gzips it, etc.

It makes it locally fine, and if you set it to delete afterwards, since it thinks it transferred, it backups and deletes it, but never transfer. No login attempt, no writing to the remote location (SCP, default 22 port)
 
Well, I don't use system backups, and this level backups can be recovered only manually be the way. DirectAdmin does not offer recover tools for them.

If not a connection attempt is done, it is probably due to either port/ip is blocked, or remote host's hash does not exist in known. Try and manually ssh to backup server from your DA server.

And sure you might want to use another type of backups as mentioned be the user @Active8.
 
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