How To Schedule And Manage Backups In InterWorx

Here’s how to configure your InterWorx VPS to take regular backups and store them on disk.

When you buy a NameHero VPS, you can choose between cPanel and InterWorx. cPanel/WHM is more well known but also costs extra. Particularly since cPanel’s licensing changes, the value proposition of cPanel has gone down dramatically. This won’t affect you on shared hosting, but it’s a direct additional cost on a VPS. So many people are turning to alternatives like InterWorx instead, which is free for unlimited accounts on NameHero’s VPS servers.

1. Log into SiteWorx

Backups in InterWorx are handled through the SiteWorx interface. When you first log into your VPS via NodeWorx, click the “SiteWorx” section on the left-hand side and select “Accounts”:

This will take you to the section of InterWorx where you can set backup schedules for specific installations. Choose the one for which you want to schedule the backup and launch SiteWorx.

2. Go to the “Schedule” Section of SiteWorx Backups

On the new SiteWorx screen, on the left, choose the backup icon and select Schedule as shown here:

Now it’s time to decide on the backup schedule.

3. Choose Three Backup Schedules

In the SiteWorx backup section, you can choose between three different backup schedules:

• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly

For each of these, you can edit the schedule and choose the parameters as shown here:

You can choose both the number of backups to keep, as well as the exact time at which the backup will be generated.

Space Considerations

It’s important to remember that your VPS storage is limited and that if configured carelessly, backups can end up eating away your disk space. Unlike some other backup solutions, InterWorx backups are not incremental, meaning that each file is a complete dump of your entire account and takes up an equal amount of space.

Ensure that you adjust the frequency of the backups carefully to sustain a healthy reserve of free space so that you don’t run out.

E-mail Notifications of Backups

Whenever InterWorx completes a backup of your account, you get an e-mail notification of success or failure like this:

This way, you’ll always have a handle on what’s happening and know immediately if something goes wrong.

Restoring Backups from NodeWorx

To restore a backup, log into InterWorx, and click “SiteWorx” on the left-hand side as before. But now, click the Backup/Restore tab and it’ll take you to a screen where you can manage your existing backups. From there, you can choose to restore any of the backups as shown here:

Choose the one you want to restore, click the button, and wait for the backup to complete.

Find a Way to Get the Backups off Your Server

Ideally, you want to also store these backups offsite so that nothing happens to them in case your server itself crashes. A solution like Amazon’s S3 is perfect for this, or more recently, Cloudflare’s R2 looks promising. You’ll have to set up the integration with your VPS, however, and the precise details are beyond the scope of this article.

I hope this guide helped you!