How to Configure Account Backups in WHM

When you want to enable automated backups or manage backup settings for hosting accounts on your VPS or Dedicated Server. This article explains backup scheduling, storage options, retention, and account restoration.

Backup Configuration

The Backup option helps you to automatically perform cPanel backups. This is a WHM option with which we can schedule auto backups of all accounts and databases. This allows you to schedule and save regular backups of your accounts to your server or an external destination such as Amazon, Google Drive, or FTP.

To access Backup Configuration option, go to WHM -> Backup -> Backup Configuration. You need to enable Backup Configuration in the Global Settings for this option to work.
There are three backup types: Compressed, Uncompressed, and Incremental. It is recommended to keep Compressed backups to save disk space and for quick and efficient data storage.
Compressed: Saves all information in compressed file. This takes more time but uses less disk space.
Uncompressed: Saves all information in an uncompressed format. This uses more disk space but is faster.
Incremental: Stores only one uncompressed file. It saves only updated information and replaces that. This limits the restoration settings but is faster and uses the least disk space.
Check the Available Disk Space: If you enable this option and the available disk space is less than the amount that you specified, the system will not run the backup.
Maximum Destination Backup Timeout: The number of seconds during which the destination backup will attempt to run. If the destination backup attempt is not successful during this time, it will time out and stop.
Maximum Backup Restoration Timeout: The number of seconds during which the system will attempt to run the backup restoration. If the restoration cannot complete in the specified time, it will cancel
Scheduling And Retention Of Backups: With this option we can schedule the backup process to the desired dates and cPanel/WHM will automatically create backups and store it in the location that we provide.
Retain backups option: is to know how many backups are to be kept in the server. For example, if you retain 4 weekly backups, in the fifth week the oldest backup will be deleted.

WHM offers 3 backup schedules

Backup Daily – Create and save backups in the selected days in a week.
Backup Weekly – Create a single weekly backup every week in a selected day.
Backup Monthly – Create a monthly backup every month in a selected day.

Files And Databases

This option allows us to specify the files and databases that we need to backup. We can also specify users for which we need to take backups incase if we don’t wish to take backups of all the users/accounts in the server.

We can also choose to enable or disable backups of files like:

Suspended Accounts
Access Logs
Bandwidth Data
Local DNS
System Files

Database backup options are

Per Account Only – Backup of all databases per account will be taken
Entire MySQL Directory – Backup of the entire MySQL data directory will be taken
Per Account and Entire MySQL Directory – This option is a concatenation of both the above options.

Configure Backup Directory

This option is very important as we need to know where these backups are getting stored. We can customize the backup location or directory in this option.
By default, the backup directory location is ‘/backup’ in the local server (same server). You can change it if you want it to move the backups to some other directory.
You can mount a separate backup drive on other mount point also.
One important feature is that we can create and store backups to external backup servers if we enable the Additional Destinations options.

Additional Backup Destinations

With this option enabled, WHM will create the backups in the intervals we choose and these created backups will be moved to the location in the external server that we specify here.
For this we just need to provide the FTP login credentials (FTP hostname, port, username, password etc.) to the external backup server and specify the location of backup directory.
Once you specify all these options asked for, just click on ‘Save Configuration‘ and you’ll have the backups ready in your desired location.

Backup Restoration

To queue an account for restoration, select either the Restore by Account tab or the Restore by Date tab.
You must click the Restore button at the bottom of the page to activate the Restoration Queue.
Use the search bar to find the specified account's name. This will be the same as the cPanel username.
After you find the specific account that you'd like to restore, you will select the specific date of the backup you wish to restore from. Please note, only dates with available backups will be shown.
Click the "Add Account to Queue". This allows you to restore multiple accounts at a time if you would like.
Once you click restore, it will process each backup that is queued.

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