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Creating Backups

Panelica 1.0.375 Verified 2026-07-24 Backup & Migration

Panelica backups are domain-shaped and complete: pick the domains, choose full or incremental, and the panel packs each domain's files, all its databases, its mailboxes, DNS and SSL into one compressed, optionally encrypted archive, as a background job you can walk away from.

Panel locationBackup → Create Backuphttps://YOUR-SERVER-IP:8443/backup/server/create
 Create Backup
Backup name
weekly-full
Full
Everything, fresh
Incremental
Only what changed since the last full
Domains
example.com · shop.example.com · blog.example.com
Encryption: AES-256 · panel key · Free disk 98 GB

Full or incremental

A full backup captures everything for the chosen domains from scratch. An incremental backup captures only the files that changed since its chain's last full backup, which makes it far smaller and faster; it needs a matching full backup to build on, and if the panel cannot find one in the same named chain it transparently promotes the run to a full backup rather than failing. Incremental availability is a licensed permission (backup.incremental); without it every backup is full.

Databases are always captured in full, even in an incremental backup. This is deliberate and hard-won: change-detection on databases proved unreliable (InnoDB's cached row statistics do not move on an UPDATE-only change, and a multi-database domain could have its extra databases missed entirely), so an incremental compares only file changes (by size, modification time and mode, with logs and session temp files excluded) while every database is freshly dumped every time. Your data is never quietly skipped.

What actually goes in

A backup is not just website files. For each domain the archive collects: all website content under the home, every one of its MySQL databases (discovered from both the panel's records and MySQL's own metadata, so nothing hides), email accounts with their password hashes and mailbox contents, mailing lists and spam lists, subdomains, cron jobs, SSL certificates, the nginx/apache/php-fpm config and DNS zone, plus FTP users and database-user records. Log files are the one deliberate exclusion.

Behind the scenes: content and mailboxes are packed with tar piped through zstd compression; each database is dumped with mysqldump --single-transaction (consistent, no table locks) straight into the compressed stream. In a full backup every domain is processed as its own parallel worker, and a metadata.json describing the whole backup rides inside the archive so a restore knows exactly what it holds. A separate lightweight manifest is written alongside the archive so the restore browser can list contents in milliseconds instead of unpacking a half-terabyte file.

Encryption and naming

Give the backup a name (it identifies the chain that incrementals attach to), then choose encryption: none, panel key (AES-256, tied to this server, decryptable only here), or password (AES-256 with a password you set, portable to any server). Password encryption is a separate permission and enforces a strong password (12+ characters, mixed case, digit, symbol). If the operator has made encryption mandatory, the "none" option is disabled. An incremental automatically inherits its chain's encryption, so a chain stays consistent.

The password protects nothing but itself, and everything. A password-encrypted backup can be restored anywhere, but if you lose the password it is unrecoverable by design: there is no panel-side escrow. Store it somewhere you trust before you rely on the backup.

Running it

Creation is a background job: the panel accepts the request, hands you a job with a live phase and percentage, and lets you keep working while it runs. There is no target picker here; backups are produced locally and can be sent to remote storage afterward or automatically by a schedule. The page shows free disk and warns before a low-space run.

Access

Behind the backup license feature (Community and up) with per-action permissions: create, incremental, encryption and password-encryption each have their own key, so an operator can allow backups while withholding, say, portable password encryption. Visibility and scope follow the roles and permissions chain, and ROOT additionally gets a Global Settings shortcut for the panel-wide backup defaults. Restoring is covered on its own page.

Panelica Documentation · Written and verified against the live panel. · Last verified 2026-07-24 on Panelica 1.0.375