Setting Up Automatic Backups

In addition to our Full Server Backups, the Plesk Control Panel offers an easy way to perform manual or automatic backups of individual subscriptions or all subscriptions. You can create an unlimited number of backups based on your server capacity. Alternatively, you can also use our Storage Box solution to store your Plesk backups on a separate storage device.

Automatic Backups of the Entire Server

In addition to subscription-specific backup tasks, as an administrator you can also set up a global backup task for all subscriptions on the server.

To do this, navigate to Tools & Settings → Backup Manager.

In the Global Backup Manager, select the Schedule menu item to create a new global backup task, edit an existing one, or disable it.

Enable the “Enable this backup task” option, then select the desired hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly interval for the backup task.

You can then specify whether you want to use incremental backups. With incremental backups, only the changes made since the last backup are saved. This saves disk space and significantly reduces the time required to complete the backup process. Please note that if an error occurs within the incremental backup chain, all backups starting from the point the error occurred cannot be restored.

Next, using the setting “Maximum number of files that can be stored for full backups (applies to both scheduled and manual backups),” you can specify the maximum number of backups to retain before Plesk automatically deletes the older ones.

In the backup settings, you can specify which files you want to back up. You can choose from the following:

• Email messages (email mailboxes)
• User files (web server files in the file system)
• Databases (MySQL databases)

By default, Plesk backups are stored on the local server hard drive. In addition to our server solutions, we also offer Storage Box solutions that can be configured for Plesk backups.

More information on Storage Box configuration

Then click the Save button to save the changes and return to the previous view.

In the Global Backup Manager, you’ll see a confirmation that the backup job has been successfully scheduled. If you want to edit or disable the scheduled backup job at a later time, simply repeat the steps as needed.