Disappointing Look at RBX

Where is the version number of RBX contained? Are the updates for it contained in the general HC updates? If so we have not seen any HC updates in quite some time.

Why is there no option for choosing which user accounts to backup?

Why is there no option to choose which domains to backup?

Why is there no option to backup other files that are not necessarily in the user folder? What if one wants to backup other folders? RBX is hardly a complete backup solution.

KieranMullen

Setting up times and days to backup would also be a simple thing to add. What other backup progams dont have this option?

KieranMullen

RBX backup setup takes backup of everything related to your HC ( whatever is configured in HC Settings ) and provides you option if you don¬t want to backup of your user data. While RBX restore setup has flexibility to select options regarding Mail, Domains, Databases etc, you can select only those options which you want to use for restore purpose.

You will be able to see version name in new RBX release. There is another option to check RBX version name from registry at this path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Advanced Communications\Nt Web Hosting Controller\rebuildXpress.

How about email backup log when finished, or only email log on error?

Another basic feature to have.

Differential backups? Daily, Weekly and Monthly backups?

KM

You can see log file at this path \Program Files\Advanced Communications\rebuildXpress\logs. If you open BackupSettings.exe then under Backup options tab you can set "Plan out backup schedule" on hr(s) and day(s) basis. There is no need to have it on monthly basis.

The needs are determined by the customer.

I should not have to check the logs every day to see if everything was backed up. This is not efficient. Email on error. Other backup programs have this. Dont tell me it is not needed.

KM

Is there any intelligence built into the backupprogram? If the FTP is down or the server share temporarily not available will it try again automatically later?

Why arent the text files compressed? This is where the savings are expecially great. In text files! This is another basic option that should be there. If licensing is an issue for zip then try the 7z open compression. http://www.7-zip.org/7z.html

Where can we set the time of day for backup to run? Days to run etc?

KieranMullen

As I take a look at the backups now done by RBX ( I have not done it fully) I noticed that even the webfiles are not compressed!

How terribly inefficient this program is. Backups and transfer would go much faster if the files were actually compressed first.

Ok lets think about this mate, what happens when you compress 12Gb of data, thousands of files, your ntfs corrupts, the backup is so corrupt that you cant recover the data. If you want to compress it, compress it onto tape. RBX isn¬t perfect but if you start compressing data into zip¬s, rar¬s etc your going to have issues.

Your best method is to use tape or something like that.

Oh out of interest have you ever tried to compress 12gb into a zip or rar then open it again, it just isn¬t worth it, if you want to compress put it on tape.

I know im hard on hc sometimes but for this i think your conplaining about nothing.

HC RBX needs some work, i.e. converting from IIS FTP to Serv-U which is complex but posible and unique.

Did you buy and pay for it?

I am not complaining about nothing. Obviously users could have mps zips and other things which would be useless to zip. But there are many simple things that could be ie logs.

Also one big archive would not be ideal, yet compressing logs for each user, or perhaps each domain or user could have its own folder breaking down the archive size.

Zip is not the only means of compression worth looking at either.

KM

Yes we purchased RBX and HC Full Licenses.

What your saying is you want this that and the other, complaining about it, that doesnt work, you dont get what you want by saying its rubbish on a forum. Put the suggestion forward to hc to compress the logs something like that.

RBX is an application in its self.

We have 68 users, around 10gb of data we have no need to compress it, we ftp it up to offsite storage and thats it. We keep a 2 week rolling backup offsite and create RBX¬s backups once a week. We backup MSSQL, MYSQL DB¬s every day and keep a 7 day rolling backup which isn¬t part of the RBX Backup.

You could make yourself a script which runs RBX then emails you the result if you want that feature now!

Compression has issues, you want storage go pay for a tape drive lol!

Compare it to other control panels you will find your better off, for example cpanel to do a restore from the backup it can take 8-11hrs to complete on say 100-150 user accounts thats a crazy amount of time. Sometimes you should consider yourself lucky.

Again submit your feature requests in an email and be nice about it or your not going to get anywhere.

I too think rbx could use a lot of work.

The stacking doesn¬t work the way it should. It deletes everything downstream from it not just what it is supposed to delete.
The program is also found by my antispyware as unidentified.

What antispyware are you running?

I would have to agree, when we are talking about GB¬s of data I really don¬t think it is going to be a good idea.

I have an extensive list of things that should be corrected.

1. Getting RBX to restore your system correctly would help. The only thing we where able to use out of RBX with our migration from w2k to w2003 was to create user account, DNS and IIS everything else was done manually. After 40 hours of testing HC still blamed it on our server. Of course I got the “we have hundreds of user using this and they don¬t have this problem” yet they could not even fix the problem.

2. If you have a backup job in MS SQL that puts backups in to separate folders for each db RBX will not backup your MS SQL databases.

From what I found RBX try’s to create sql backup files with no ext in the default sql backup dir, since there is already a folder with the same name it fails.

So anyone that has sql back up jobs you might want to check that you have backup. Including your HC database!

3. It will not restore all of the user data. During the 20-30 test runs we here off in the restored dir by about 440 files and 27 dir and all of this data was random, it could have been a different folder or file so we could not rely on this either.

I have few more items but not worth mentioning at this point.

So we spent the money for RBX so we would not have to spend the time manually restoring HC and what happen we ended up spending about 50 hours testing and then finally restoring the server 50% of it by hand.

oh, did I mention that it did not work last time we tried to use it after a hardware failure a year ago.

That doesn¬t sound good for our migration next week looks like we could be in for some fun!

We hold a 7day backup for mssql so we can restore the dbs without any major issues but if this is true and RBX doesn¬t do the full job, thinks refund might be needed.

As in the UK if it doesn¬t do what it says on the tin you get your money back!