Yes, if you ask the admins at Hostgator, they should be able to restore the backup for you. Their helpdesk is really good!

Wil

If this help someone – it erase the archives older then 6 days …

find /home/username/ -name ‘backup-*’ -mtime +6 -exec rm {} \;

Funny really because some marketers rely on dozens if not hundreds of websites for their full time income, and at any point in time their site and income could be dropped at any time. This HAS happened to me 2 or 3 times in the past years so folks, bite the bullet and just do it.
Shaun

This particular method is used for full cPanel backups. You can create a script that only backs up a certain directory and create a cron job to run that on a schedule. That’s pretty simple. The issue is that it will not get the MySQL backups, which the full backup does, so you would have to do something different to get the MySQL backups for each of your databases.

Wil

Sorry it is not working for you. A LOT of people have used this procedure and got it working without hitches. I am not sure why it is not working for you. When you create the cron job, are you leaving the double quotes in place? If you want to download and zip the two files (change you password in the files, of course), I will be glad to look at them for you. Just upload the zip file to a web accessible directory and post a link here…(I won’t approve the comment to nobody will see your URL).

Wil

Make sure the entire script is on one line. Open two browser tabs and copy the script from above and paste it into the editor. Do NOT paste it anywhere else first the copy/paste again.

Wil

wget: missing URL
Usage: wget [OPTION]… [URL]…

Try `wget –help’ for more options.

Just use the default setting for character encoding in the cPanel text editor, which is probably UTF-8.

Wil

Do what I suggested above (recopying the scripts), but this is a different problem all together. In the video I showed you how to use the file editor in cPanel. It looks to me like you pasted it into MS Word or some other word processor and then uploaded because my script is one single line (not 3) and those commands it is complaining about are control characters that your word processing application is adding in. Please delete the scripts on your server and try again using the cPanel web-based file editor as shown in the video.

Wil

Please copy the scripts again from above and recreate on your server. It looks like my new template messed up the double quotes and I had not noticed. This is probably the issue. They are fixed now.

Sorry for the trouble you had with it. Let me know how it goes.

Wil

/home/********/backup.sh: line 1: {rtf1ansiansicpg1252deff0deflang1033{fonttbl{f0fswissfcharset0: command not found
/home/********/backup.sh: line 1: }}: command not found
/home/********/backup.sh: line 2: {*generator: command not found
/home/********/backup.sh: line 2: }viewkind4uc1pardf0fs20: command not found
/home/********/backup.sh: line 3: syntax error near unexpected token `}’
/home/********/backup.sh: line 3: `}’

Glad you enjoyed it. To answer your question, yes, this process will back you entire account (including all the data). Since add-on domains are simply folders inside the public_html directory, it will indeed back those up.

You can see this by downloading the backup file and extracting it on your local machine, so you can see all the data.

Wil

Excellent info.
Q? Will this backup include Add on Domains and/or Subdomains?

Thanks
Paul

I have my FTP or Amazon S3 server backup script available for free on my webiste. It’s configured for GoDaddy, but can be changed for any dedicated server.

1st: After I pasted and saved the script into the HostGator text editor, some of the “-” were being auto converted into the ascii code for the symbol “–”. The only ones that actually changed were the first “-” in the following: “–http-user=$1″ , “–http-password=$2″ and in “–post-data=”. So I disabled the auto Disable Character Encoding for the HostGator text editor and then it saved correctly.

After that I finally started receiving error msgs when the backup was run. I had not been receiving any msgs before this.

2nd: Once I received the error msgs, I looked up a list of options for wget and realized that I needed to have “–” instead of “-” in front of “–http-user=$1″ , “–http-password=$2″ and in “–post-data=”. Once I made those changes the Backup was successful!

Thanks for all your help and the tutorial!

Can you double check the file name of the script your created? Is the file called backup.sh?

Is it in the root directory of your account? (at the same level as the public_html directory, not within it, for example)? Can you post a screen shot of your directory somewhere and send me a link on Twitter?

Also, the filename is case sensitive, as is your username and password.

Wil

1. Did you leave the USERNAME and PASSWORD in the cron command inside quotes? You should surround those values with quotes (the video does not show this, but the example code does). This is required in case you have special characters such as “&,?,” or others in your password.

2. Did you copy and paste the the backup.sh script exactly as above? The entire script is one single line. If you pasted it elsewhere and used another text editor then uploaded the file, that may be your issue. Make sure you create the file exactly as I showed on the video using cPanel so that there are no special characters (line feeds, carriage returns, etc) in the file. Copy the code, go into the cPanel editor and paste the whole script exactly as it is show in the sample code above.

Wil

Looks like your s3sync solution can easily be used with the tutorial I show here in order to only have 1 file to upload.

In looking at your script, I learned something VERY cool that I was not aware of….the mysqldump switch to dump all existing databases at once. VERY cool!

Wil

1. Create a folder in the root directory called “backupfolder”

2. Create a cron job as shown in the video with the following command: mv ~/*.gz backupfolder

3. Make sure you schedule this for about 30 minutes or so after the backup runs to make sure you backup completes before this runs.

What this will do is use the Linux/Unix “mv” command to move the backup file from the root directory to the “backupfolder” so your FTP client can just download those files.

Don’t forget to also remove the files from the server, otherwise you will eventually run out of disk space and if your FTP client is not smart enough to realize that the old files have already been downloaded, each day your downloads will take longer as more files will get downloaded.

Wil

Excellent job with the explanation. I didn’t realize it was so easy to backup your files. Going to have to try this. Recently I upgraded my phplist through Fantastico, and it caused major havoc. This would have come in handy. I was able to get it restored, but what if I hadn’t.

Thanks.