How to download cpbackup backups

Hello,

There is no such a master tar.gz file. cPanel can take account backup only and there is no option to bundle the backup of all users to a file!

Yes, you can scp the files to your local machine if you need a local copy of backup. Else if you have a local FTP/SSH server running, you can configure cPanel backup to move backup files remotely than to local drive.

Thank you.

 

Putting all the account backups into a single file for multiple sites would be a VERY BAD IDEA!

You would, in most cases, end up with an extremely massively huge file which at best would be hard to transfer.

Also, unless you are talking about a small handful of sites or less, I strongly do not recommend downloading backups to a home cable or DSL internet account as you would often be talking about an enormous amount of a data transfer and bandwidth used for really no purpose whatsoever and to put the files back again would usually be a somewhat lengthy and difficult process because of slower upload speeds on most home accounts.

I would recommend that you get another server location somewhere else in a different data center which could be as simple as a small VPS server (you only really need the hard drive space and SCP access) or any of the free file storage services out there (though on these I'd consider encrypting the files before transferring them).

Transferring files from server to server at data center speeds is often many times faster than transferring copies of the files to or from home so it won't take as long to download duplicate copies of your backups.

Another plus is if you had another server, even a small cheap VPS, you could actually automate the backup process very easily and have your main hosting server automatically transfer the files on a regular cron schedule.

If you are doing the backups manually however, I'd usually recommend using /scripts/pkgacct "cpmove" files verses the automatic nightly backup files in cpbackup as these files tend to be a little bit more robust for re-creating accounts should something go wrong and I've seen fewer problems restoring those files though you can use either.

I understand you are thinking about "What happens if something happens to my server?" or even "What happens if something happens to my host or the data center?".

These are all good things to think about but unless you only have a couple of small sites to worry about, I would not be making regular downloads to your home computer but rather setup some other server source deliberately in a different data center and even a different geographical location from your main server. With that kind of redundancy, it will be doubtful you'll ever lose any data even in the most "worst case" type of scenario.

Cpbackup is the primary backup for your web sites should something happen to those sites such as hacked, hard drive failure, etc.

Ideally, cpbackup should be directed to a different drive than your primary drive or a separate configured RAID storage array. This way your primary backups will all likely still be around in the event of a drive failure of your primary data storage.

You can direct cpbackup to go to the same drive storage as your web sites but in doing so the backups are limited really to being able to fix hacking or screw ups by the user and would not be very useful for hardware failures.

Keeping a duplicate copies of those same backups in a different server, in a different data center, on a different network, at a different geographical location however gives you the ultimate redundancy and in that case you would be protected from not only failure of your hardware on your hosting server but also from your data center going offline and / or your host going out of business.