VPS Backups and Disaster Recovery

Virtual machines fail for reasons beyond hardware: operator error, ransomware, bad deploys, and corrupted databases. Nexelya panel operations such as reimage are destructive by design. A documented backup strategy is the difference between minutes of recovery and days of reconstruction.

Nexelya recommends the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of data, on two media types, with one off-site. VPS economics make this achievable without enterprise budgets.

Capture application data, configuration files, TLS certificates, cron jobs, and infrastructure-as-code repos. For databases, use logical dumps (mysqldump, pg_dump) or volume-consistent snapshots with brief write freezes or native backup tools.

Document restore order: network config, database, application, workers, caches. Test that dependencies start cleanly.

• Configuration in /etc and deployment manifests.
• User-generated content and object storage pointers.
• Secrets stored separately—restore keys before apps start.

File-level backups via restic, BorgBackup, or rsync to S3-compatible storage are cost-effective and deduplicate well. Schedule with systemd timers or cron and monitor exit codes.

Hypervisor snapshots, when available for your plan, are useful for pre-upgrade checkpoints but should not be your only off-site strategy—replication and storage failure domains still matter.

Define retention: daily for 7 days, weekly for 4 weeks, monthly for 12 months. Automate pruning to control cost. Encrypt backup repositories with keys stored outside the VPS being backed up.

Run quarterly restore drills into an isolated VPS. Nexelya makes it inexpensive to spin up a verification instance, restore data, run smoke tests, then destroy the VM.

Maintain a one-page runbook: RTO/RPO targets, contact tree, backup locations, and rebuild steps from empty VPS. Include Stripe billing and DNS provider steps if the primary region is unavailable.

For mission-critical systems, consider a warm standby VPS in the same Nexelya cluster or a dedicated server for steady-state load with VPS for burst—mixing Nexelya products with Nexelya managed services simplifies vendor relationships.

Panel snapshots, when offered, live on the same infrastructure fault domain as the VM. Always replicate backups to object storage in another region or provider account.

Restic and Borg support S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and self-hosted MinIO—choose storage with versioning and lifecycle policies to control cost.

Test restores quarterly; an untested backup is a wish, not a strategy.