How to use the Contabo Backup-Space

Ordering our FTP Backup-Space is always a good choice for saving important data on an external storage.

Using that backup space can be done in many different ways, I will show you some of the most reliable ones.

Please note, that a connection to our backup space can only be established within our datacenter. Therefore, a connection is only possible between your server and the backup server, both are located in our datacenter.

You also need to configure our DNS resolvers, those resolvers are configured as default in any installation – if you changed something and need help setting them up, please contact our support. You can simply test the configuration by using ping on your server: ping backup.contabo.net, if the name is resolved to an IP address, your are using the correct configuration. Please notice that the name of the server can differ, for example it might be backup-2.contabo.net. You will find it in your e-mail with the credentials.

Windows:

On our Windows servers you have an graphical user interface (GUI) via RDP, so a third party application such as Filezilla can be used without any annoying configuration steps. In Filezilla you can connect using the information as follows:

Host: backup.contabo.net
Username:
Password:

You should be connected now using encryption and you can transfer all the data you want to save.

winfilezilla

An alternate way is to mount the backup space directly as a network drive.
Open “This PC” where your drives show up and choose “add network location”.

Please enter this address:
ftp://<username>:<password>@backup.contabo.net

winftp

winbup

Unfortunately, Windows does not support an implicit FTP encryption, therefore, we highly recommend using some third party FTP client application.

Linux:

On Linux you can either use an FTP client or mount the backup space using some additional software.

Almost any FTP software can be used here, we recommend using lftp which supports encryption via FTP. Depending on your distribution, the necessary package can simply be installed, e.g. by issuing apt-get install lftp .

For the best performance while transferring the data, we recommend creating an archive, e.g.
tar -czf backup.tar.gz /home/File_1 /home/File_2

If you’re not sure about your admin rights, always enter the command sudo -i at the beginning of every session:
sudo -i
This command will grant you the rights of a power user, so you don’t have to write the command sudo at the beginning of every command line.

Now you can conveniently upload your files to the backup space using lftp:

:~# lftp
lftp :~> set ftp:ssl-force true
lftp :~> set ssl:verify-certificate no
lftp :~> connect backup.contabo.net
lftp backup.contabo.net:~> login <Username>
Password:

Since you are now successfully connected to the backup space, create a directory
mkdir backups

and move into.
cd backups

Finally,  you can upload your archive:
put /path_to_file/backup.tar.gz .

Similar to Windows, you can mount the backup space directly into the local file-system structure. On Linux you have several advantages like mounting with encryption. What you need is curlftpfs and some dependencies.

First install those packages from your repository:
apt-get update && apt-get install fuse fuse-utils curlftpfs

On Debian 8 (Ubuntu 16.04) and later the package “fuse-utils” might not be available anymore.

Just enter the following to install all necessary packages and dependencies :

apt update && apt install curlftpfs

For CentOS 7 you need to install the EPEL repository first :

yum install epel-release
yum install curlftpfs

Now create a folder where you want to mount your backup space:
mkdir /mnt/ftp

To avoid other users to see your password in the process overview (top, htop, ps, etc.), you need to put the following information into your .netrc file. This file should be located in your users home directory but might has to be created first.

machine backup.contabo.net
login <username>
password <password>

You can now mount the backup space via FTP with the following command:
curlftpfs -o ssl,no_verify_peer backup.contabo.net /mnt/ftp

On CentOS7 you might experience difficulties when accessing the folder, in that case try remounting the FTP without SSL encryption.

umount /mnt/ftp/ && curlftpfs -o no_verify_peer backup.contabo.net /mnt/ftp

Another option is to start curlftpfs in foreground with the parameter “-f”.

curlftpfs -o ssl,no_verify_peer backup.contabo.net /mnt/ftp -f -v

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