I hear a lot of complaints about Plesk's backup routines and how they can bring a server to its knees. You can reduce the load (except for mysqldumps) by renicing pleskbackup. If you want something really handy, use this Perl scriptlet that I wrote:
#!/usr/bin/perl @domains = `ls /var/www/vhosts/ | egrep -v '^default\$|^chroot\$'`; $today = `date +%m%d%y`; foreach $domain (@domains) { chomp($domain); $cmd = "nice -n 19 /usr/local/psa/bin/pleskbackup -vv domains $domain --skip-logs - | ssh someuser\@somehost -i /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa \"dd of=/home/username/pleskbackups/$domain-$today.dump\""; `$cmd`; }
It will transmit your backups to another server via SSH, and it will reduce the priority to the lowest available. This combination will reduce CPU usage and disk I/O throughout the backup.
In the restore
/usr/local/psa/bin/pleskrestore --create-map domain.org-030808 -map map_domain
####map_domain#######
[] # The client not exists.
domain.org 111.111.111.111 # IP address 111.111.111.111 does not belong to target client's '' IP pool
mysql::@localhost:3306
####map_domain#######
/usr/local/psa/bin/pleskrestore --restore domain.org-030808 -level domains -filter list:domain.org -map map_domain
## ERROR in line 1: Bad client login
we edit map_domain
####map_domain#######
[client] # The client not exists.
111.111.111.111
domain.org 111.111.111.111 # IP address 111.111.111.111 does not belong to target client's '' IP pool
mysql::@localhost:3306
####map_domain#######
/usr/local/psa/bin/pleskrestore --restore domain.org-030808 -level domains -filter list:domainorg -map map_domain
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Restore has been started
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tiempo perdido: 00:00:00
Tiempo perdido: 00:00:05Client client does not exist, but is expected to.
I thought I would try this - and it's great!
Except...
I thought I would try a test restore through the GUI. So I deleted my test domain from Plesk. Then re-created it, and uploaded my *.dump file to the repository. But Plesk just said "Not a backup file" and would not allow a restore. I guess I am missing something pretty basic?