Acronis Backup ?

Monarobase

Hello, I've been following the roadmap to see when / if enhance would be a good alternative for our cPanel customers.
I have noticed that Acronis Backup is no longer on the RoadMap.
We have found Acronis Backup to be the only backup solution that works well for backing up large servers.

JetBackup was too ressource intensive.
R1Soft was too slow and slowed down over time.

Whereas Acronis does daily incremental backups up 4+ TB in less than an hour and does not slow down when there are lots of backup points.

We currently have our own Acronis backup cluster and do not like the idea of moving to a slower, less reliable and more ressource intensive backup solution.

Adam

We are still considering integration of Acronis backup but it was removed from the immediate roadmap based on customer feedback. The number of customers who would benefit from this feature is very small compared to some of the other things we are prioritising.

The built-in Enhance backups are incremental, they are extremely efficient, fast to create, fast to restore and integrated directly into the control panel. They require no additional software or licensing. If you are running mass hosting I would definitely recommend this method of backing up.

In addition we're building S3 as an alternative backup target - this is less efficient but it's ideal for smaller clusters (ie. managed/unmanaged dedicated customers) where a separate backup server would be excessive.

Dan

In my previous position we used Acronis with cPanel for a few years and it worked very well. However I don't really believe Enhance needs it at the moment.

The built in backup system works great and with a couple of improvements (downloadable backups, failure notifications) there isn't really a need for an Acronis integration in my opinion - it's very fast and just works.

It probably is a good idea to have a block level backup for DR purposes, especially of the control panel server but you can just run the Acronis agent without an integration for those.

Monarobase

Some of our customers have more than 600GB of files and those files would need to be in sync with the database backup and some accounts with over a million inodes.

We tried using Jetbackup and it took too long to run incremental backups and it slowed our server down alot.

We will wait to see if / when you implement Acronis then. I'm pleased you are still considering it.

Rich

Monarobase

Just to let you know I currently have _350GB of data in enhance between mostly 2 websites. My backups are done within 1 hour. I have it on a 6 hour backup schedule currently. Nothing is overloaded, far far from it in fact.

I know that's not Acronis, I am just offering an example of where enhance can handle large websites within it's own tools and its exceptionally efficient in it's backup storage.

btrfs uses b-trees instead of inodes and there isn't a technical limitation in that sense, more about available diskspace and metadata overhead. So 1 million inodes probably isn't going to be a problem. Right now I have 3.8 million inodes and it's handling that fine.

Monarobase

Our cPanel VMs have 4TB of data and Acronis does incremental backups in 1 hour.

I had not read that enhance made use of btrfs to run backups, maybe it’s much more efficient than running rsync so I will definitely give it a go once enhance has implemented the features that are on the current roadmap ( full cPanel migrations, Imunify360 etc.).

Rich

It does use rsync, but the backup role mounts a /block device and formats it btrfs. It's this that makes the snapshots of rsync diff's and is super efficient in it's storage footprint.

My servers are most certainly are a few thousand miles apart. Likewise I think rsync takes so long, due to the massive number of small cached files its scanning through. I am sure it will be different for different peoples setups. Only way to know is to test it out sometime. 99% of them 3.8 million inodes is within only 89GB. So lots of small files. I also have a db with 2100 tables in it all this adds to it's longer backup time. This one site takes up most of the backup cycle else the rest is done in like 10minutes.

Good luck if and when you do 🙂

Monarobase

Oh that’s a shame, that means that for large accounts database backups might have an hours difference with the last files to be backed up.
Acronis works with snapshots for the full file system to the database backups and the files backups are at exactly the same time.