Short answer: a restore that "finished" is not the same as a restore that brought everything back. Salvo now restores standard cPanel backups from the panel, the command line or the API, and at the end it shows side by side what was in the backup and what came back, plus how the server behaved during the restore. We tested it with a real account restored four times: the same content every time, and all 23,174 email messages identical byte for byte to the original.
The question every admin asks after a restore
When a customer asks for an account back, the restore usually ends with a success message and nothing else. Did all the mailboxes come back? All the messages? The domains? The scheduled tasks? Most of the time, the only way to know is to check by hand, or to wait for the customer to complain.
And there is a second question nobody answers: how much did that restore weigh on a server that is still serving other sites?
What Salvo shows at the end of a restore
- Backup × restored, item by item: domains, mailboxes, messages, databases, files and scheduled tasks, with what was in the backup next to what came back.
- The server during the restore, in charts: CPU and load, disk reads and writes, disk usage and inodes, measured every 2 seconds.
- History: every restore is kept with its full log, so one restore can be compared with another over time.
Panel or command line: the same result
We restored the same real account (about 2.1 GB, 14 mailboxes and 23 thousand messages) four times on another server that already serves websites and email: twice from the command line and twice from the Salvo panel in WHM (Lab 18).
| Command line | Panel | |
|---|---|---|
| Restore time | 1 min 01 s | 54 s |
| Mailboxes | 14 → 14 | 14 → 14 |
| Messages | 23,174 → 23,174 | 23,174 → 23,174 |
| Peak server CPU | 75% | 76% |
| Peak disk writes | 396 MB/s | 385 MB/s |
All four restores brought back exactly the same content. Compared file by file with the original account, 99.77% of the files were identical byte for byte; the rest is regenerated by the panel itself on restore or arrived at the source after the backup. Every email message was identical.
What the test taught us
On the first restore from the panel, the log came out with extra lines compared with the command line, because the process inherited the web page's environment. Salvo now always restores with the same environment, wherever the restore is started, and both logs became identical, line by line. That is the point of measuring: a difference that nobody would notice in a success message showed up in the comparison.
What we don't know yet
- It was one account, without databases. Accounts with databases are the next test.
- The restore itself is done by the panel's own tool; Salvo drives it, measures, compares and records.
Salvo is in development. Join the waitlist to test it on your servers.