What should one be backing up on the server?

[isdoo]

Should both disks fail on my RAID and I lost everything, what should I be backing up?

I guess that I would get the datacenter to rebuild the server and then I would put the information back on server.

However I do not really want to backup what I do not need (for example I reckon some of the optional scripts all take up space)

I am sure it is more than just /home/*

Thank you.

[cPanelDavidG]

Personally, on my server, I just backup the account information+data. I just go into Configure Backups in WHM and let that handle backing up the accounts for me. It just makes things simpler on me to ensure everything associated with the accounts is backed up and nothing extra is backed up. I don't get worried about backing up server configurations because default cPanel&WHM configurations change with time, so a good "start from scratch" is a good thing once in a very great while (e.g. when one finally outgrows/outlives their hardware) .

[isdoo]

Thanks.

Silly question now - what directories would that be?

(sorry for the newbie question)

I am using an external script for backing up

[cPanelDavidG]

Quite a few - don't recall everything offhand.

Any particular reason for using an external script?

[isdoo]

okay. Thanks anyway.

Reason for external? Firstly it is off-site, is relatively inexpensive, allows users to restore backups themselves from different time stamps over the last week / month.

[cPanelTristan]

If you are backing up directories rather than using cPanel backups, then I would suggest the list mentioned here:

http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/rsync-ba...tml#post671150

Of note, if you have InnoDB enabled, it isn't advisable to only copy /var/lib/mysql but to take a full mysqldump instead of the databases using this type of command:

mysqldump --add-drop-table --all-databases | gzip > /home/alldatabases.sql.gz

This will backup all the databases and put them into a file at /home/alldatabases.sql.gz, which you could then copy with /home contents.