Backing up a cpanel hosting account

Since 2005 I have hosted this web page in the Cpanel based Bluehost company. First with Joomla and recently migrated to WordPress.

Bluehost allows to download a daily, weekly and monthly backup from your Cpanel control panel, but manual intervention is needed:

  1. Logon in the control panel
  2. Navigate to the backup page
  3. Perform the backup
  4. Download it to your local computer.

This is a manually/time consuming task and of course you should not forget it!!

In this post I gonna show my automatic method to backup files and databases using:

  1. Crontab for automatic backups.
  2. Public/private keys for passwordless ssh connections.
  3. Rsync command for synchronizing directories between remote and local servers. This way bandwidth is reduced as if a file has already been copied to the local server no data transfer is needed.
  4. Mysqldump for dumping the MySQL databases to a local file.
  5. SpiderOak for data deduplication and remote backup.

Some previous knowledge is needed to understand how it works, anyway there are some useful links to understand it. 🙂

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