Hello.

My friend was wondering...

He has a reseller account.

How does he back his clients sites up?
Is it possible to backup to a remore server?

what control panel

I think its Cpanel. :)

cpanel has a backup daemon that will tar and then upload to a remote FTP. other then that, you can install backup software like tivoli or veritas netbackup to do a FULL OS backup.

How does the backup daemon work? do you need root?

Thanks :)

yes, what i ment by daemon is that you need to install one of those backup clients onto the machine... that is done by the service provider of the backup solution. then, the service provider has the server end of the backup software that will go in and initiate a backup on a given interval and have it all transfer directly off the server and keep it secure on tape and or drive arrays. If a full backup is made and a crash occurs, all that is needed is to have OS reinstalled, backup client reinstalled, and then restore all files and reboot... we have tested this with *nix and windows based OSes.

I just spoke to him, and he said he doesnt have root.

Is there any other way? :)

If you don't have root, then you don't really have a lot of alternatives to backing something up from one site to another. Your best bet is to have the users download the stuff themselves. It's bad, I know, but that's going to be your best bet.

The reason for this is security. You can't get to the user's mail, etc, files without global access (ie: root). So, you can't backup users without this access.

I don't know if WHM has designed a backup for resellers yet, but you may want to have your friend check into that, see if he has access to that. As far as remote backups, again, I haven't tested it, but you SHOULD be able to back up the files remotely without root access.

WHM doesn't have a backup for resellers yet, so yes you are pretty much stuck with having to do it manually site by site for the moment, logging in to their Cpanel using the reseller passwords for example.

How many sites does he have?

He has only got a few I think. Can he login to their CPanel with his reseller password?

Yes he can.