Backing up with WHM, or through accounts cPanel

[czerdrill]

Hello,

I have scheduled weekly backups through WHM which are stored in /backup/cpbackup/weekly on a remote FTP server. When I browse to that directory I see all the tar.gz files for each individual account on the server. So this means I can restore an individual account if a client requests it, correct?

My question is what is the difference between the client doing a backup themselves through cPanel's Backup Wizard when they log into their cPanel and me doing it on my end through WHM. Will we get the same result? In other words, my clients are not technically savvy, so if I have the WHM backups for them do they even need to necessarily keep the cPAnel backups themselves?

 

[NetMantis]

For backing up, you can do that via WHM automatically or the user can do that via cpanel and really there is no real significant difference in the backups other than the filename and location of the backup files on those.

For restoring however, you would need to do that.

Now with the above said, I personally recommend disabling the backup functions on the User's Cpanel in "Feature Manager" in WHM and the reason I say this is because users generating their own backups does put a sizable cpu and memory usage overhead on many servers which can slow down your hosting server for sometimes quite a while depending on the size of the hosting account. Also, most end users are on either DSL or Cable modems at home which are substantially slower than Data Center to Data Center transfers which means when they go to download the backup files they generate, it may take an extra long time to download which ties up a sizable portion of your server's network card and bandwidth longer than typically necessary in automated server to server backups. The last ugly point is many user's often forget to delete the backups they create from their accounts (or even leave multiple copies) causing your automatic backups, unless explicitly configured not to do so, backing up not only the user's account but also all the bloody duplicate backups they generated as well. This of course slows downs the creation of the backups you are generating and severely increases your own backup resource overhead as well creating backups of backups of backups, etc!

If a user wants to keep an offline backup, I generally suggest they either use FTP to download their files or I'll make them a cpmove backup (/scripts/pkgacct <user>) which is far superior to the one generated in their cpanel anyway and just give them a copy of the backup I generate until they can download it.

 

[czerdrill]

hi NetMantis,

Thanks a lot I understand everything you said except this small part:

For restoring however, you would need to do that.

Can you expand on what you meant by "you would need to that"? Are you saying that with the WHM backups (or the cPanel backups if they were to generate their own) I would have to be the one to restore them? If so, yep I knew that. If not, can you explain further?

Thanks again for your answer!

 

[cPanelTristan]

There was a discussion around the time of your thread on restores recently. Restores can only be performed by the root level user for WHM or SSH (including a reseller with root-level privileges). Given the context of what was stated for the quote, it does appear this is what was being noted.

Basically, cPanel users and non-root level resellers cannot perform restores. This is due to the fact that it would be a privilege escalation to allow them to perform a restore. Some of the restore processes have to run as root. This poses a security risk to allow anyone other than root to do a restore for that reason.

 

[JeffP.]

If a user wants to keep an offline backup, I generally suggest they either use FTP to download their files or I'll make them a cpmove backup (/scripts/pkgacct <user>) which is far superior to the one generated in their cpanel anyway and just give them a copy of the backup I generate until they can download it.

How is a manual /scripts/pkgacct superior than using cPanel's backup feature, when it uses /scripts/pkgacct to package the file?

root     20203  0.0  0.0   3796   480 ?        SN   14:56   0:00  \_ /usr/local/cpanel/bin/cpuwatch 14.0 /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/pkgacct USER /home userbackup