From time to time I get crazy ideas, and last week that crazy ideas was to test how well incremental backups can be restored in the latest version of Plesk. Specifically I wanted to know how Plesk would react in times of a crisis, which usually happens at the worst of times.
Up until recently I’ve always done full backups – but incremental backups are a lot more space saving on the target device, plus it reduces the load on the server and data traffic significantly. Let’s see what these incremental backups are all about.
Wikipedia suggests that after a full backup, each increment needs to be available to make a restore. This would indicate that deleting one backup in the middle (simulating a failed backup) would mean the restore would fail.
But how does Plesk work, and how would it react if we’d take away an increment in the middle? Would it indeed need all incremental parts to rebuild a backup? Or would it always refer to the full backup and write its increments accordingly? Let’s find out!
I’m using a test system on a CentOS 7.5 server, with Plesk Onyx 17.8 installed. I have a test domain with a default WordPress instance, but it’s not doing much at the moment and could probably do with a quick facelift if anything.