Forgive me if this is an option some where - I'm just starting my journey with Directadmin. I tried to search for documentation on this but did not find anything.
It would be nice if Directadmin had a method to "backup" an account with everything except for the home directory. This can greatly reduce the "packaging" time since 9 times out of 10 the bulk of an account is in it's home directory.
That's what I've been doing on cPanel for a long, long time - and it greatly improved my back up times. Package up everything pertaining to the cPanel hosting account, but exclude the home directory (pkgacct ... --skiphomedir). Then I have a cPanel package to rsync over to a remote server and I can grab the home directory for the account directly.
This just helped my backup times so much. If an account has 20GB in it's home directory, packaging up that 20GB every night was a killer. But creating the cPanel backup package without the home directory - which maybe was 100MB - then rsyncing that over to a remote backup server and rsyncing the account's home directory - gave me a full backup on the remote backup server without a lot of overhead.
Looking (quickly.. I've yet to go in-depth) at the Directadmin backup system - I can probably do this by just manually copying the necessary files and kind of building my own backup system from scratch. But I thought this might be something that would be beneficial to others - so if it's something Directadmin can cook up, it might be better.
The one area that this system didn't actually help a lot was if the account had massive databases. If the account has 20GB in databases, then that is still packaged up every night. I never really found a good solution to this... and honestly it was so few, it wasn't really worth spending a lot of effort on. We have maybe a handful of accounts that have massive databases. We're not losing anything with this system - because a cPanel backup with the home directory would still include the massive databases - but there are a ton of accounts with huge home directories (probably mostly mail) and this helps immensely.
It would be nice if Directadmin had a method to "backup" an account with everything except for the home directory. This can greatly reduce the "packaging" time since 9 times out of 10 the bulk of an account is in it's home directory.
That's what I've been doing on cPanel for a long, long time - and it greatly improved my back up times. Package up everything pertaining to the cPanel hosting account, but exclude the home directory (pkgacct ... --skiphomedir). Then I have a cPanel package to rsync over to a remote server and I can grab the home directory for the account directly.
This just helped my backup times so much. If an account has 20GB in it's home directory, packaging up that 20GB every night was a killer. But creating the cPanel backup package without the home directory - which maybe was 100MB - then rsyncing that over to a remote backup server and rsyncing the account's home directory - gave me a full backup on the remote backup server without a lot of overhead.
Looking (quickly.. I've yet to go in-depth) at the Directadmin backup system - I can probably do this by just manually copying the necessary files and kind of building my own backup system from scratch. But I thought this might be something that would be beneficial to others - so if it's something Directadmin can cook up, it might be better.
The one area that this system didn't actually help a lot was if the account had massive databases. If the account has 20GB in databases, then that is still packaged up every night. I never really found a good solution to this... and honestly it was so few, it wasn't really worth spending a lot of effort on. We have maybe a handful of accounts that have massive databases. We're not losing anything with this system - because a cPanel backup with the home directory would still include the massive databases - but there are a ton of accounts with huge home directories (probably mostly mail) and this helps immensely.
