At Clouding.io, we have a very useful feature that lets you Restore a Backup to a new Server. This can be very useful in some situations. If you do not have any backups yet, you can configure backups for a server in 5 minutes. You can also use our panel to Manage backups easily.
The backups created at Clouding.io cover the entire server. We could describe them as exact clones at the time the backup is created, meaning that if the server is modified after the backup, those changes are not reflected in the backup. On our blog, we have a very interesting article explaining many features of Backups at Clouding.io.
In all our images, we have configured a service called Cloud-init that allows the machines created to communicate with our platform. At Clouding, we have configured them specifically to work correctly on our platform. Even so, there are settings that need to be taken into account.
We have configured the images so that available package updates are installed when the server starts for the first time. This only happens once, and if you need to restart the server for any reason, the packages will not be updated. However, if you restore from a backup, the packages will probably be updated (since this is the first time that machine has run).
This means that if you have a server running Ubuntu 20.04 and have not updated it for some time, the option to update packages when the machine starts for the first time is probably enabled if you restore from a backup. Once the restoration is complete, you will probably not have an exact restoration of the server and may find that an Ubuntu update has been installed and you have Ubuntu 20.04.3 instead of Ubuntu 20.04.
To avoid this, simply modify the package_upgrade parameter in the Cloud-init configuration file.
# vi /etc/cloud/cloud.cfgFind the package_upgrade parameter, which probably has the value "true", and change it to "false":
package_upgrade: falseOnce you have modified it, you need to wait for a new backup to be created before you can restore to a new server with this parameter disabled, preventing packages from being updated during restoration.