Give your server a new lease of life with a quick and easy update…

There comes a time in every server’s life when it needs a slightly newer version of its software. Thankfully, with modern Linux distributions, all it takes is a few keystrokes to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of your system.

As a general rule however, before you do undertake an upgrade, make sure you have a full backup of your server just in case the upgrade does go wrong. It doesn’t happen normally, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

How To Set up Backup

Snapshot is an easy backup method that’s available to VPS customers who have servers with a deployed disk space of 80GB or lower.

Using snapshot backups, VPS.NET will take a “snapshot” of your VPS once a day, every week and every month. At the end of the month, it will retain one daily, one weekly, one monthly and one manual backup from a day of your choice.

Snapshots can be turned-on through the following link…

https://control.vps.net/virtual_machines/ID_of_VPS/

If you do not have any backups enabled for existing VPS, you will see the following message/option for your backups displayed when you click through to this link.

From here, you’ll need to use the edit button, shown below.

Next, go to ‘Backup Manager’ section and open it up.

Once you’ve clicked through to the Backup Manager option, you’ll get the following window.All you have to do now is put a tick next to the ‘Snapshot’ option and save your changes using the ‘Save’ button at the bottom of the page.

At this point you’ll be returned to the main page of your VPS, where you’ll be able to see that backup has been enabled.

To find out more about the status of these backups, go to the ‘Copy & Backup’ tab.

After that you will see the following…

You’ll see that all your backups are marked as ‘Pending’ at this stage. The first snapshot backup should be available there within next 24 hours. The time zone on your backups tab is the one that you set while creating your VPS.net account.

When backups are created their state changes to ‘Built’…

At this point, the date of creation will be the same for all the backups you have created. Later snapshot backups will show the correct time and date of creation.

In addition to the day, week and monthly back-ups, you also have the option to set up your own manual snapshot. To do this, visit the ‘Backups’ tab and click on the ‘Create a new Snapshot’ option…

After that a manual snapshot backup category will be added to list of backups and it will be in ‘Pending’ state during creation.

The priority of your manual snapshot will be higher than auto backup, so it should be created faster. Usually it takes between 1 and 6 hours, depending on the size of your data on your VPS. When backup is created you will be able to see it as ‘Built’…

As you can only have one manual snapshot set up at a time, you will need to delete your original manual snapshot if you wish to replace it with a new one. You can delete a manual snapshot by using the ‘Trash’ icon next to manual snapshot backup option…

The deleting process can take up to 10 minutes.

How To Upgrade

If you are running an Ubuntu/Debian setup then you may already be familiar with apt-get. To see if there are any updates ready for your server, log-in via SSH as root and run

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

This will show you a list of what needs to be upgraded. If it all looks good type “Y” to do the upgrade. The system will automatically download and install the updates for you.

If you are running a RedHat/CentOS box you can do this via

yum update && yum upgrade