Automated backups save your server's disks on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. Choose how many backups to retain, then use them to restore the server or recover selected files.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Choose your backup settings

Choose backup retention when creating a server, or open an existing server in mPanel and select Change Plan. Daily, weekly and monthly retention can be combined.

For an existing server with no backups, you can also open Backups > Schedule and select Enable Backups to turn on onsite daily backups kept for 2 days; the monthly cost is shown before you confirm. Use Change Plan for weekly or monthly backups, longer retention or offsite copies.

For a new server, select View All under the server settings to see the individual daily, weekly and monthly choices.

Backup pricing

Backup charges depend on provisioned storage and the number of backups retained. Check the quote shown in mPanel for your server before confirming your selection.

For example, the September 2026 quote for a new Sydney Standard server with a 20 GB disk prices onsite backups at A$0.05 per GB per retained backup per month. Two daily backups plus one weekly backup gives three retained backups at A$1 each: A$3 per month excluding GST. Offsite copies are priced separately at a flat rate per GB of the server's disk, not per retained backup; the quote shown in mPanel when you enable offsite copies gives the exact monthly figure for your server.

Retention is the number of backups kept, not a separate charge for every scheduled backup created.

Set the backup schedule

Open Backups > Schedule to choose the approximate start hour and the weekly backup day, then select Save Schedule. Change retention through Change Plan, not the schedule controls. If the server has no backups yet, this tab shows an Enable Backups button instead.

Times and days are shown in Sydney time for all server regions: the weekly backup day and the monthly backup date are Sydney calendar days, so for a Perth server a "Sunday 1am" weekly backup starts on Saturday evening Perth time. Backups are queued from the selected hour and may start later depending on system load.

The times shown for individual backups on Backups > Manage (and when downloading or restoring) are in your own computer's time zone, with the zone named, for example AEST or AWST. They can therefore differ from the Sydney-time schedule if you are in another time zone.

The new panel's backup schedule and configured backup frequency

Create a backup before a change

Check which backup will be replaced
If you choose to replace an existing backup, check its label and date before starting. An in-progress backup cannot be cancelled.

Open Backups > Create, choose an available backup option, enter a descriptive label and select Create Backup Now. Wait for the backup to finish before relying on it for recovery.

Create a labelled daily backup in the current panel

Where backups are stored

Onsite backups are stored separately from the server in the same data centre. Optional offsite copies go to BinaryLane-managed Amazon S3 storage in the Sydney region (Australia) and provide a copy outside that data centre; this is the only offsite option. With offsite copies enabled, every completed scheduled backup, and any backup you upload or take into a daily, weekly or monthly slot, is copied offsite, normally within a day of the backup finishing; temporary backups and ISO images are never copied offsite. When a server is cancelled and removed, its onsite backups are deleted and any offsite copies are deleted in the same way. Offsite storage is a redundancy measure for recovery if onsite backups fail and is accessible only to BinaryLane operations staff. Amazon S3 is operated by a U.S. company and is subject to the U.S. CLOUD Act; if data sovereignty matters to you, leave offsite copies off and download backups on a schedule to storage you control instead. Backups are not encrypted at rest. If you need your backups encrypted, encrypt the data at rest inside the server (full-disk or volume encryption): a backup of an encrypted disk is itself encrypted, and you hold the keys.

How retention works

Daily, weekly and monthly backups have separate retention counts. When a frequency's available slots are full, its oldest unlocked backup is replaced.

When schedules coincide, the less frequent backup takes precedence. For example, a scheduled weekly backup replaces that day's daily job rather than creating an identical daily copy.

You can lock an individual backup in Backups > Manage to prevent replacement until it is unlocked. Attached backups are automatically locked. Temporary backups cannot be manually locked.

The backups listed under Backups > Manage are the only backups BinaryLane holds for your server. There are no other platform-level copies, and BinaryLane does not take snapshots of servers. If no backup from before a change exists there, recovery has to come from the server itself or from copies you hold elsewhere.

Temporary (one-off) backups

A backup taken from Backups > Create outside a schedule, or uploaded as an image, is a temporary (one-off) backup. Each server holds one. A temporary backup is removed automatically 48 hours after it was taken (an uploaded .iso after 7 days) and cannot be deleted earlier, by you or by support; taking a new temporary backup of the same server replaces it. At most two temporary backups can be taken of a server in any seven-day period, after which Create Backup shows "Temporary backup limit of 2 per 7 day period has been reached." A one-off backup that has disappeared after two days was removed by this retention, not lost to a fault, and BinaryLane holds no other copy of it. Temporary backups are never copied offsite and cannot be locked. They are not a substitute for scheduled backups: for copies you can rely on, enable backups on the Schedule tab or add retention on Change Plan.

Recover from a backup

Restoring replaces the server's disks
A full restore discards changes made since the selected backup and takes the server offline during restoration. Copy out anything you still need before restoring. Use file recovery instead when you only need selected files.

After restoring, wait for the operation to complete, then connect to the server and check your files and services. A completed disk restore does not by itself confirm that every application is working.

There is no charge for restoring a backup, whether it is a scheduled backup or a temporary one. Backup slots are charged at their own price, and restoring does not add to that.