Greetings,
A naive question if I may.
I am about to buy a Plesk box and, being a newbie, am uncertain about the back-up process in Plesk.
I wish to be able to automate a daily full backup of the OS and data and to keep this process and the backed up data secure.
Would it be correct to say that, using Plesk 6, I could install an auto-backup utility which would create a clone of the sites hosted+their configurations which could be used to perform a restore from later if necessary?
Would experienced users then suggest buying a 2 HD box and using the second drive for backup? If not, then how would you backup if you only have one box? To a local drive where you are located? Will the backup utility write to my own computer?
Will I be able to store a historical backup record or does the utility overwrite previous backups?
A friend is helping with the command line & security stuff, I really need the advice re which box to buy! Thanks for your help and advice.

It's recommended to get a second HDD to perform backups, but it's even more recommended to get a remote storage facility. Plesk doesn't provide such features, but there are software options for such backups.

I don't *need* an extra 60GB of storage in the box and, as you point out, a remote solution would be more secure.

So what do most of you guys do? Do you use some Rackshack backup space (seems to be out of stock at this precise time)?

Just so I understand this totally, am I right in saying that Plesk6 has a utility built in which will automate client/domain backups for the server admin, or is this a specific add-in which must be bought separately directly from Plesk?

BTW, some interesting utilities, 4PSA...

A quick DSL or cable at your office or home would probably suffice to download and store backups. When you have more servers, preferably at different data centres, you can use them to store backups from one another.

Plesk has a good backup / restore utility which is freely downloadable from their ftp. Other than that, you can use any number of free backup scripts / programs that will work just as good on a Plesk server than on any other linux server. Search arround. Refer also to Plesk's forum, where these kind of threads exist too.