cPanel offers a very useful backup facility, but nothing much in the way of scheduled or automated backup. Whilst managing regular backups for a single website can become a repetitive chore, carrying out the same procedure for multiple websites becomes a much greater burden and that often means that it won’t get done.
So what happens when your hosting server fails for some reason and you website is not only down, but your data and files are at risk of corruption too?
There’s no doubt about it, a well-thought out backup plan can be a real life-saver when stuff hits the fan and whilst the likes of the Ensim hosting control panel allow a complete reseller account backup, this doesn’t exist at the reseller level for cPanel.
As a WHM root user, local and remote backups can be easily automated. As a cPanel reseller, your solutions don’t come as easy. However, I’ve recently ordered and am currently testing out CP Site Saver as a desktop-based backup utility for cPanel hosted websites. Basically, you provide the application with details about each of the websites and database you want to backup including scheduling details it will then carry out the backups as specified using the built-in cPanel backup functionality.
So far, after a couple of days, it’s low price certainly seems to offer excellent protection from a potentially crippling situation.
Don’t imagine that web hosting disasters only happen to other people as yet another host I’ve had dealings with has just spent the best part of a week trying to recover from a hard disk that failed during the scheduled backup. Unfortunately, the backup was set-up to overwrite the previous backup and the disk failure resulted in a corrupted backup. The host in question is yet another to have to learn the hard way about the importance of a well thought out backup process. Is your host going to be next?