How to Backup WiredTree VPS to Amazon S3 with WHM

I wanted to back up my Cpanel accounts to Amazon S3 using WHM.

Unfortunately, WHM doesn’t do this by default. I found some paid solutions, but then I stumbled on Andy’s fantastic tutorial here…

http://fiddyp.co.uk/cpanel-backups-to-amazon-s3/

There’s some minor changes you need to make. If you’re running CentOS 6 on WiredTree, you’ll need to change the Repo to:

http://s3tools.org/repo/RHEL_6/s3tools.repo

That’s about it. The setup was very easy and it’s highly recommended.

Restoring a site using this method is quick and painless in case of disaster. You just SSH back into the server and enter this command:

mkdir restore
s3cmd -r get s3://yourbucketname/2011-02-32/filename.gz restore

How to Force Start a Manual WHM Backup

Trying to force a backup to run in WHM? You need to Putty/SSH into your server as the ROOT user and run the following command:

For newer VPS servers using the latest backup:

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/backup –force

For older VPS servers using Legacy backup:

/scripts/cpbackup –force

That’s all that’s needed. The script will fire off and create backups.