Create a Post-Backup script for WHM to S3

If you have a WHM/cPanel based server, then you probably already have a daily backup running that keeps daily, weekly and monthly backups in another folder. But this does not help if the server disappears - you also need an offsite backup and Amazons S3 is perfect for this.

The good news is that there already exists a 'hook' that is run after an cPanel backup that we can use to do this.

Note: The functionality already exists to FTP backups to an external FTP server.

First you need to set up backups in WHM

1. Log into WHM
2. Select Backups -> Configure Backup
3. Backup Status = "Enabled"
4. Select time frames and other options as desired.
5. Backup Destination = "/backup"

Now we need to write our hook script. SSH into your server as root.

touch /scripts/postcpbackup

chmod +x /scripts/postcpbackup

vim /scripts/postcpbackup

add these lines. You will need to get your amazon keys and setup a target bucket from the AWS site

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=xxx export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=xxx s3sync -v -r --delete /backup/cpbackup/daily/ bucketname:daily/

And all done.

You can manually run the backup with

/scripts/cpbackup

and check that it has synchronised your daily backup to the S3 bucket when finished.

As a final note,

• This backup does every single setting, file and log file for a cpanel account and so *should* be fully recoverable.
• It only keeps the last copy (for disaster recovery - ie. your server explodes) and not older copies (for error recovery). These are kept on the server itself depending on how you configured the WHM backup.