What To Backup For CPanel Restore?

[frelliot]

Hello,

I do daily cpanel backup of whole server and all accounts. Then I do daily rsync incremental transfer of backup to another box located at different place.

The backup directory structure is similar to this:

/daily
  /dirs
  /files
  /x account
  /x1 account...

I believe this is the best backup configuration after reading plenty of posts hear. I do not want to rely on RAID, the realibilty is for me more important that the instant restore. But...

My main concern is about mysql backup - do I really need "Per Accounts and Entire Mysql Dir" option? What is "Entire Mysql Dir" for? Is it worth the disk space?

From what I have read it is much better to restore mysql from dumps, and "plain mysql files" may be not enough to restore. So why should I backup these files? What do you think?


And one more question: how to restore from this backup when failure day comes?
I have no experience with this and it may be too late one day I would copy the whole backup directory to the new disk with fresh OS+Cpanel, but what to do next? Is there Cpanel script to do this?

Thanks a lot.

Frelliot.

[chirpy]

It's a good idea to use the "Per Accounts and Entire Mysql Dir" . The first does a mysqldump, the second is a copy of /var/lib/mysql - it's handy having both incase the mysqldumps have failed for some reason. The mysql dir isn't ideal as MySQL isn't stopped when it is run, but it's better than losing a database.

My personal preference to restore a whole server and maintain IP address allocation is to use this procedure:

1. Restore /dirs/_var_cpanel.tar.gz
2. Delete all the files in /var/cpanel/users/*
3. Restore /files/_etc_ips.gz
4. Perform a Multi-Restore in WHM for all the user accounts
5. Rebuild apache and php as you had them before
6. Restore /files/_usr_local_apache_conf_apache_conf.gz
7. Restart apache
8. Restore /dirs/_var_named.tar.gz
9. Restore /files/_etc_named_conf.gz
10. Restart named