Automate Your Business

Archive for the ‘Cpanel Backup’ Category

A customer emailed me recently to say that someone (he says his host, but admits it might have been him, by accident) had deleted the backups from his server in order to save space. Fortunately, there was nothing wrong with his site(s), just that he was left with no backup to restore in case of future problems.

Realising that it’s a bit of a risk having no backups, he wisely went on to purchase the Cpanel Auto Domain Backup script that I sell. Which means that not only will he have backups made overnight, but he’ll have them both within Cpanel and also FTPed to another location. Ideally this will be a different physical location, so if his host server farm goes up in flames, his backups are safe somewhere else. Don’t laugh – similar things have happened to me.

Are you exposed to a similar risk? If so, take a moment to review the backup software.

I’m on the Rhodes brothers’ mailing lists, because they have some great products available. But they’ve just sent this update on their business:

Our main web server crashed…

Yesterday at 10:53AM EST our web sites suffered
a major meltdown. We lost just about everything
on our server, including our blogs, memberships,
opt in pages, download pages, and more.

** Ouch! **

We have some backups but not enough for a full
restore. And, we just found out that some of our
local backups are corrupt too.

Don’t be one of the people that this happens to. Make sure you are backing your websites (or to put it more strongly, make sure you are backing up your business). And not just the webpages – also the databases, the email accounts, the hosting configuration, and everything else that you do within Cpanel.

And every so often, make a backup, and then restore it immediately, just to make sure the backups are not corrupt. I had this problem too, so I personally know how you go from heartache (“someone’s hacked my sites”) to relief (“I’ve got the backup from yesterday”) to confusion (“Dear support: why won’t my backup restore?”) back to double heartache (“Dear customer: your backups were corrupt”).

Start backing up. Now.

Just a quick update. A few users of the Cpanel Auto Domain Backup script have asked if I can recommend somewhere for FTP storage. Well, I’ve just heard of SoftLayer.com, and they offer 50Gb of storage (with FTP and other methods of access) for only $10 a month.

Their terms state: “Plans include 1GB bandwidth. Once the monthly bandwidth allotment has been met, there will be a $0.10/GB charge for bandwidth used during the remainder of the current billing cycle. All plans include free inbound bandwidth.” Which sounds pretty good to me for this situations.

They backup locally (ie, in their data centre) via RAID. Which is techno-babble for “several disks which mirror each other”, which is great because if one disk fails, they have others with a copy of your data. They don’t backup to a remote site, however. But, if you’re running the backup script, you’ll have backups at your host already, and then an extra backup at SoftLayer. So unless both sites go up in flames at the same time, your data should be safe.

The last one in our series of backup problems is not one that can be resolved by the backup script.

I had backups scheduled. They were running. They were FTPing to my own home PC as well as a local copy on the hosting company’s server.

Sweet.

Once a week or so, I’d log in and check that they were still running. Yes, there they were, all the accounts backed up, with the latest backup for each domain showing as being completed within the last 24 hours.

Then there was a problem – the kernel on my VPS had not been updated, a parked domain had been hacked and used in a Paypal scam, and the host insisted on rebuilding the VPS so that there were no “backdoors” left by the hacker.

“Not a problem,” said I. “Please go ahead.”

… wait…

“Er, Mr Peacock,” said support. “Our backups are corrupt.”

“That’s OK,” I said. “Here’s a copy I’ve got on my own PC.”

“Er, Mr Peacock,” said support. “Your backups are corrupt as well.”

“Oh *~$!,” I said.

Luckily, I had the source code for the websites in my working folders on my PC, but I lost the data from the databases.

So… the moral for today is to every-so-often, take a fresh backup (in the Cpanel Auto Domain Backup script, just hit “Run” next to the relevant domain). Then create a hosting accout ON A SEPARATE HOST, with the same account username, and restore that backup. You should still be able to access the account using a URL like this:

http://www.host.com/~accountusername

(but check with your host if this is exactly right). It should pretty much be a copy of the live site. You might find some issues where an application is trying to access the proper domain name, and it doesn’t like the temporary name above, but as least you’ll then know that the backup itself is OK.

Hope that helps.

Short and sweet this one.

Sometimes, it’s actually possible for website owners to forget to set up any sort of backup.

Oops…

The “auto” in Cpanel Auto Domain Backup takes care of that bit for you