504 Gateway Time-out

[retiredcaps]

I have been seeing them regularly now too and a couple have happened after I have composed a reply to a post and then lost the post. It is getting very annoying.

I had a 504 timeout as well at the same time everyone else is reporting.

As for losing your post, I always compose long responses in notepad and save regularly.  Then I paste.

[EEVblog]

Ok, this is getting ridiculous. I will now permanently disable autositebackup.com and will have to find another backup solution.
The site will no longer be backed up daily until I can find something else.

[lemmegraphdat]

Ok, this is getting ridiculous. I will now permanently disable autositebackup.com and will have to find another backup solution.
The site will no longer be backed up daily until I can find something else.

No worries Dave. You'll fix it. A one man band has a lot on his hands.

[EEVblog]

The R1soft Cpanel plugin doesn't sound good:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1090512

[EEVblog]

WHM has to option to automatically backup the server. I'm not sure in what format it does this though. It supports both local (pointless?) or remote FTP backup.
http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/11_32/WHMDocs/ConfigBackup

If I had a remote FTP directory on another server somewhere, then that would do the job. But unless it could somehow only keep the last X backups, the backup drive space would quickly fill up.
I have other servers I could presumably FTP into, but they are just cheap shared servers, and don't allow storage of backups as part of their T&C.

[Monkeh]

Why not send the backups home?

And please please don't use FTP. Please.

[EEVblog]

Why not send the backups home?

How do I do that?
I don't run an FTP server 24/7, or at all.
Also, a 7GB+ backup each day will kill my entire monthly download budget.

And please please don't use FTP. Please.

WHM backup only supports FTP.

[Monkeh]

Why not send the backups home?

How do I do that?
I don't run an FTP server 24/7, or at all.

Well, you need to run a service to receive it. Or do the backup by having one of your machines connect to the server.

And please please don't use FTP. Please.

WHM backup only supports FTP.

Abandon ship. DO NOT use FTP. I don't care what the software supports, FTP leaves your arse hanging in the breeze. It's the most insecure thing you can use.

[EEVblog]

Ah, siteautobackup.com also supports WHM backup as well. Perhaps that will work better, as presumably it would be using the WHM backup facility instead of cPanel backup. Will requite more disk space though as I presume it backs up the entire server instead of just the cPanel account?

[EEVblog]

I do think that suspending backups is unwise. Until you find a better solution I recommend setting the server to read only status for backups. Or something else.

I have no choice. I cannot have my entire server go down every day due to this backup process.

[EEVblog]

Abandon ship. DO NOT use FTP. I don't care what the software supports, FTP leaves your arse hanging in the breeze. It's the most insecure thing you can use.

So a lot of people keep telling me.
I don't think the world is going to end if I get WHM to connect to another server via FTP and send the backup there.

If you have a better option for doing my backups then please mention it.

[EEVblog]

I have enabled autositebackup.com to do a daily back of my WHM account, and existign cpanel account back has been disabled again. I'll see how much space it takes and if it brings down the server like cpanel backup does.

[justanothercanuck]

Can't you just script it?  Do a mysqldump for the database, and tar up the webroot...  the rest should just be the OS, which is inconsequential for a website so long as they provide apache with php (and maybe cgi) and mysql.

[Monkeh]

Abandon ship. DO NOT use FTP. I don't care what the software supports, FTP leaves your arse hanging in the breeze. It's the most insecure thing you can use.

So a lot of people keep telling me.
I don't think the world is going to end if I get WHM to connect to another server via FTP and send the backup there.

You've had one security failure recently, FTP is begging for more. Time to double check I used a unique password here..

If you have a better option for doing my backups then please mention it.

I don't know exactly what you need to backup or to where, and frankly I can't think of any simple one button solutions worth using. The already mentioned MySQL replication idea should work nicely for the databases, though.

[EEVblog]

Can't you just script it?  Do a mysqldump for the database, and tar up the webroot...  the rest should just be the OS, which is inconsequential for a website so long as they provide apache with php (and maybe cgi) and mysql.

Maybe, if I learn how to script.
But the issues remains, where does the backup get sent and how?
Backing up to the servers own hard drive is of course pointless.
I also cannot download to my own machine due to monthly bandwidth limitations.
The WHM backup seems to be the best option at the moment, lets see if it works.

[Monkeh]

I also cannot download to my own machine due to monthly bandwidth limitations.

Your various sites have that much data moving through that a daily delta is a significant amount of bandwidth?

[EEVblog]

I just manually started the WHM backup via siteautobackup.com, lets see if the server holds up.
I have no idea how long it will take.

[EEVblog]

Your various sites have that much data moving through that a daily delta is a significant amount of bandwidth?

No, but please tell me how to do a daily delta...
Remember, I am not an IT geek, have no desire to learn, no desire to leave my machine on 24/7, and no desire to manually do anything. I just want my website and databases automatically backed up daily, somewhere off site to my server.
The WHM backup does not support delta to a remote host via FTP.

[Monkeh]

Your various sites have that much data moving through that a daily delta is a significant amount of bandwidth?

No, but please tell me how to do a daily delta...

A tool such as rdiff-backup run on a daily basis (which can be automated) can handle that for flat files. You still need an appropriate target for it to backup to. A low power fileserver is a simple solution.

[EEVblog]

A tool such as rdiff-backup run on a daily basis (which can be automated) can handle that for flat files. You still need an appropriate target for it to backup to. A low power fileserver is a simple solution.

Why should I have to run my own box to do this when there are a zillion others already running 24/7?

[Monkeh]

A tool such as rdiff-backup run on a daily basis (which can be automated) can handle that for flat files. You still need an appropriate target for it to backup to. A low power fileserver is a simple solution.

Why should I have to run my own box to do this when there are a zillion others already running 24/7?

I don't know, because apparently none of them offer a reliable, secure service?

I wouldn't trust siteautobackup.com as far as I could throw them, and seeing as they're 'cloud based' (ooh, shiny..) that's not very far.

[EEVblog]

I wouldn't trust siteautobackup.com as far as I could throw them, and seeing as they're 'cloud based' (ooh, shiny..) that's not very far.

Really?
I sense this is nothing but unsubstantiated fear mongering.
Are you seriously suggesting that the Amazon S3 cloud that siteautobackup uses is less reliable than using a box running in my house?

[EEVblog]

Well, I just got the 504 error message again.
This is now beyond ridiculous.
I cannot believe that both capnel and WHM backups cause a dedicated server to lock up and refuse to respond every time it does a backup. If that was the case, millions of websites would be down.
This same server used to work just fine using HostGators own WHM automated backup to a 2nd disk, and also using siteautobackup.com
I suspect it's only since the server was switched over to 64bit and all the performance tweeks have been made that the problem has arisen. I could be wrong, but it most certainly used to work just fine with no reports of 504 gateway errors.
 

[Monkeh]

I wouldn't trust siteautobackup.com as far as I could throw them, and seeing as they're 'cloud based' (ooh, shiny..) that's not very far.

Really?
I sense this is nothing but unsubstantiated fear mongering.
Are you seriously suggesting that the Amazon S3 cloud that siteautobackup uses is less reliable than using a box running in my house?

I don't trust them from a security standpoint. Nor do I trust them to be doing their jobs right.

If they provide unencrypted FTP access, they've failed completely already.

[EEVblog]

I don't trust them from a security standpoint. Nor do I trust them to be doing their jobs right.

That of absolutely no help to me what so ever.

If they provide unencrypted FTP access, they've failed completely already.

They don't, it has nothing to do with FTP.