Backing up WHM & Directory Question

May 15, 2019
24
2
3
California
cPanel Access Level
Website Owner
I have backups enabled to run nightly and sent offsite to Backblaze so my customer accounts are safe and stored elsewhere. If something happens to my server, can I:
  1. backup the whm through WHM Backups?
  2. what kind of file(s) does it create
  3. lastly, how is it restored?
I'm asking because my current process would be to 1) reinstall os, 2)reinstall whm, 3)restore all the separate accounts one by one.
 
Last edited:

rbairwell

Well-Known Member
May 28, 2022
111
48
28
Mansfield, Nottingham, UK
cPanel Access Level
Root Administrator
There's two "types" of backups (available under WHM->Backup Configuration->Files), "Backup User Accounts" and "Backup System Files".

User Accounts
Backing up only user accounts will only allow restoration of the user accounts via either the WHM->Backup Restoration , WHM->Transfer or Restore a cPanel account or via cPanel itself.
I can confirm the backups contain the entire /home/username/ directory, MySQL databases, PostgreSQL database and DNS configuration. You can confirm this yourself by downloading the individual backups from /backup/ and examining them "by hand" or deleting a test cPanel account and restoring it. By default it does not backup access logs or bandwidth data, but those are selectable in the backup configuration screen.

System backup Files
These backups cover the main cPanel/WHM related server configuration (as detailed on System Backups | cPanel & WHM Documentation ), but NOT any "OS specific configurations" (so /etc/ passwd is backed up as WHM writes to it, but not (for example) /etc/ csh.login or /etc/ rc* .

Full System Restore
If you need to do a full system restore, you will need to reinstall the OS, reinstall WHM/cPanel and then copy over your backups from Backblaze to the server (say into /backup/ ). You will need to manually restore the server level configuration files (just a case of copying them across) and then you can do the WHM->Backup Restoration and select all accounts
 
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