using Putty....
looking through *********** - how do i find the Virtaul acounts such as:
www.xxxx.com/~genericusername

if you have ssh account you can put the name of each directory in the home partition after the "~" !

by why would you want to do that ?

im confused.....

I want to know how to access a..... ~folder
(using SSH)

For multiple reasons including file checks.

Which control panel? Under Plesk they are in the "web_user" in domain root.

when it says:
bin dev etc home lib sbin tmp usr var


then where?

Erm, from there you can go almost anywhere, lol. It's one level up from root on a Plesk box. Your virtual hosts are in /home. In Plesk:

/home/httpd/vhosts/domain.com/web_user

why cant i grab stuff of the FTP i want to backup :o

"cd ~username" (without the quotes) will change to the user's home directory in linux.

You can't backup all files through FTP
a) because each domain's owner owns its own files. Linux permissions can be set to disallow one user from downloading another user's files. Also, an FTP account may be chrooted to only show one user's directories and files.
b) FTPing as root is dangerous since passwords are sent in plain text, so it is generally disabled.