Chrysalis said:
Jeff I would maybe pay depending on the price, but the thing that will put people off is that it isnt something they will be using a lot, maybe will never use it, it is something useful if perhaps the server dies and needs reformatting or doing a location move.
I suppose you don't buy car insurance until after you wreck your car either, then.
Or flood insurance which perhaps millions of people didn't buy because they didn't think they needed it until New Orleans and lots of communities around it ended up under water.
People will rightly think this should be already in DA, if you write a backup feature then the restore featore should be with it,
I believe that at some point someone from DA posted that the reason they didn't write a restore was because how you restored could be very different depending on the purpose of your restore, whether you were restoring to an empty machine or a machine already in use, to the same OS distribution or another, etc. If they didn't write it, then they probably should have, or maybe I already did.
Because it's true. If we're to write the system it will be to restore a whole backup from one system to another, empty one, running the same OS distribution on the same architecture.
Why? because that's the only way to know in advance how to do the restore.
And you need to know what to do in order to script it.
Of course we'll also allow you to selectively unpack the backup if you just need a file or two.
are DA even planning on making the restore feature or are they satisfied they have a half finished feature.
I don't consider it a half finished feature, perhaps because I've been administering unix systems for long before Linux was even written. And I've never known a sysadmin who scripted a restore of content. We script a backup of enough files so we can do a restore of content. Or we script a backup of the entire server (a tarball of "/"). (In fact, that's why tar was written; it's a contraction of "tape archive".
But to find out what DA's plans are, the best thing would be to ask them.
I'll certainly ask them before beginning work on our own system; I wouldn't want to invest time in something that we'd neither need nor be able to sell.
I mean right now we backup all our users using the reseller backup feature but dont backup the resellers. We seem to have 3 options for backing up the resellers and their users.
1 - Use the system backup feature to backup all home dir's etc. But I think if backing up user's this way they are not compatible with the reseller restore feature, and its awlkrawd to specifically choose reseller's and their users with this.
I don't know if this would give you all you need.
2 - Login as the reseller's and run backup, this I assume would use their traffic quota.
When you're running your reseller backup you can checkmark all the users, including the reseller backup. Then when you restore you should:
a) create the reseller as a reseller on the new server
b) restore the reseller user first in one run
c) then restore the rest of the users.
This should work. At the moment there are some problems under certain circumstances. For example, if a user has ten mailboxes and then the reseller changes his package so he can only have five. We've also had problems with some suspended users, but we're not sure why. We've asked DA staff to look into these problems.
3 - Do it manually either in the shell yourself or writing own script. This should defenitly not be needed as I expect the control panel to do it.
Because we were previously a Plesk Gold Partner, we end up using Plesk as our reference example.
Their backup system creates a monolithic file of proprietary design; back when there was a 2 gig file limitation they didn't even handle that; they just explained how you could use linux commands to split the file, and to put it back together while restoring it. There was no way to restore individual files without restoring the entire system, and there was no way to run the restore unless you had another system running a licensed copy of the same Plesk version on the same OS. And Plesk licenses do not come cheap.
So we found the three methods included in DA to be a wonderful feature, and though we've got our complaints, we've learned to use them.
We've recently published the settings for system backup which should enable you to restore your system. That's as far as we're going to go for the community unless we decide to write a package to sell.
Our own clients know to what extents we go to get them up and running as quickly as possible should they have a problem.
Jeff
