I thought I was doing the right thing by using the automated one-click backup thingy at CyberHostPlus.com who use the very popular CPanel. Indeed a big fat backup.tar.gz file would dutifully download to my PC each time.

It was only when their server mucked up and I lost my entire mailing list of 1423 names that I found out that no, Marina Newman the reseller who'd told me to backup didnt mean to use the automatic thingy at all. She didnt trust it. Now you tell me!

Since then the techs are saying they'll recover my list (I say: if it's still there) at $80 hour.

So be warned.

- If you use CPanel, find another way to backup. Go into very detailed discussions with your host, plus examine the contents of your backup file.

- If you dont use CPanel, dont start.

I moved to eHostingBiz.com - it's different but so far no complaints.

gh55

but what happened to the backup.tar.gz file that you said you downloaded to your pc.....??

That backup only downloads your /home directory, I think. This would not include any mail or mailing lists.

I don't have a problem using the backup and restore features in Cpanel. I just move a few of my clients web design sites to a new server. In fact one site had about 50 members in their members area(password protected directory) and another had about 20 pop emails for their staff which consumes about 20MB disk space which they probably did not delete their mails from the server where they are using webmail to access their mail. The only problem was the counter did not function properly but that was fixed and everything was intact and worked very normal and smoothly during the transfer without the clients noticing that their sites have been moved to a different server.

Probably your host's Cpanel may have a bug, that's why it's not working properly.

umm on the user end there is no bug, it doesnt backup anything other then the /home directory :eek:

/var is also very important..

Ohh NO, not another unlimited transfer host, good luck :bawling:


Originally posted by gh55
I moved to eHostingBiz.com - it's different but so far no complaints. ( http://eprofitnews.ehostingbiz.com/WebCenter )

gh55
http://eProfitNews.com

The backup should include mail. No mailing Lists or Mysql databases the client has are currently backed up by Cpanel. We use an external script to backup SQL, Mailinglists, Cpanel. etc. At least then, there is a copy if something is lost.



Originally posted by f5hosting
That backup only downloads your /home directory, I think. This would not include any mail or mailing lists.

WHM allows you to backup to /home/backup/ or /backup if you have an additional partion. It backups everything mailing list etc I'm pretty sure. It is always best to have RAID drives or at least 2 IDE just incase something goes wrong. Anyways just my $.2 cents.



:flamethr: Unlimited..

I believe CPanel has a problem with back ups over 30MB , in that case you would need ssh access to tar everything up.
With ssh you can do a mysql dump to back up your databases or access phpmyadmin and copy and paste the dump to notepad or something.

There are scripts around that will email a database backup to you via a cron job, you can't backup often enough is the key.

CPanel alone can not be relied upon to do backups, nor can any other control panel for that matter.

Sorry that you lost the data, I think it unfair to charge you for retrieving the data if it was a server problem though.

I wrote a Perl script a while back that would include your MySQL databases in your instant backup... just install it and run it as a cron job every night... if you're using decent 3rd party mailing list software, then the data is probably stored in a MySQL database...

http://www.tribby.com/dev/mysql.txt