My struggle with lcbackup.

My first experience with the Backup feature in LC3 is that of confusion as if it still were a Beta release. In fact I am still very reluctant to call a bug report or complaint because I am still unsure what is expected behavior. The only I do here is to transmit my confusion.

I will first present what I did to get it somewhat working. I decided to keep it simple by choosing for tar with local storage. I hope lcbackup is prepared to run some pre/post scripts to (un)mount the destination folder after/before backup?

My initial test setup:

• Server A
  • Liveconfig host
  • 1st DNS
  • Client's HTTP
  • Client's Database
• Server B
  • Mail
  • 2nd DNS
  • Company HTTP & Database, for Roundcube and other apps

This tested okay so far using the following accounts outline:

• Admin account
  • Account A (company use of server A)
    • main domain with some tool apps
  • Account B (company use of server B)
    • mail subdomain on server B with Roundcube
  • Customer My Company
    • Reseller account (to separate client accounts)
      • Client A (test account)

My steps to configure Backup.

• Activate Backup on all servers where it is needed.
  • LC menu: ☞ Servers ☞ localhost (Column ID) ☞ BACK-UP (Tab)
  • Click [ Add storage ]
    • Form data
      • Description: xxx backup
      • Type: tar
      • Directory: /var/backups/liveconfig
      • Location: local
    • Click [ 🗸 Save ]
  • Check that Services ☞ lcbackup shows a circled check mark (service is running)
  • Which should be consistent with the result of the following command:
    • sudo systemctl status backup
  • Remedy when unloaded, inactive etc.
    sudo systemctl unmask lcbackup
    sudo systemctl enable lcbackup
    sudo systemctl start lcbackup

Then I wanted to test primarily the function of manual backup as advertised in the UI. My main interest was to use this to migrate accounts from my old server. I activated this for the Client A test account which was a sub-account of the Company Reseller (see my test account outline):

• Customers ☞ click company's row ☞ click button [ Log in as user Client A ]
  • Customers ☞ click client A row ☞ click ACCOUNTS (tab) ☞ click account summary
  • Click BACKUP (tab)
    • activate allow customer to trigger backup manually
    • set (for instance) keep up to 3 manual backups and minimum time to wait between two backups: 10 minutes.
    • Click button [ 🗸 Save ]
  • I clicked back to Client A's OVERVIEW tab and clicked button [ Log in as user 'Client A' ]

I looked for the promised means to manually trigger a backup by client A but I did not find it anywhere. Since there is no documentation I keep doubting if this a bug or a configuration error. I first thought it might be an issue with reseller sub accounts, but the reseller has the same manual backup setting and after activating it and logging in as, I could not find it in there either. What am I missing?

Then I started playing around with Backup schedules. I made some test schedules and then:

• I checked the backup location at /var/backup/liveconfig. There were (scheduled) backups as set up in menu BACKUP ☞ SCHEDULES
• They apparently were only related to the accounts A and B I created as the admin for admin.
  • Their schedules are visible in their account setting, but I cannot change the retention. The Delete button is not an option here because it will delete the whole account.
  • When I compare that with the Reseller created under the company customer then I notice in the account setting that you can still edit the schedules there.
    • Is that because there were no backups yet?
    • Or is that because they can only set once?
  • Apparently the retention setting activates the schedule, but you cannot change the retention any more when there was a backup created.
    • I deleted all backups of account A and still the retention could not be ediited.
• I found to location to restore was in WEBSPACE ☞ BACKUP with a page wide select select box to switch between the accounts. In both I could enter the restore page after clicking one of the retained backups in the list.
  • The Reseller had no WEBSPACE of its own, so there was no way to check there.
  • The Client A WEBSPACE ☞ BACKUP the list of backups was empty, like there was no way to set backup retention in their account.

So far my superficial impressions. I wanted to translate this into German but then found out I would loose all outlines. Sorry about that. Now I have to revert to writing my own scripts, because beside being unable to trigger manual backup, I don't see an option to upload backup files.