Backup Terminology: Full? Partial? Home ?

lmstearn

• March 08, 2024 22:43
• Edited

Hi,

The cPanel interface descriptions can present as a little confusing to first-timers.

A Full Backup is the same as a Full Account Backup - is there a case when it is not the same? The docs do not explain.

Here, four destinations are offered when Generating a Full Backup. The Home Directory is one of them. The docs describe a Home Directory Backup File. This includes "All of the files that you own" and others. Thus a Home Directory Backup is always a Full Backup, and would be identical to the backups posted at any of the other three destinations.

Yet the button "Restore A Home Directory Backup" is situated under the "Partial Backups" section. Further, the statement "You cannot restore full backups through your cPanel interface." appears on the Download Backup page (accessed from the Full Backup section). What's the point of having a Restore button in the cPanel interface if one cannot restore with it?

What's more, when excluding certain files from a backup, the backup is no longer a Full Backup, but a Partial Backup. One can easily download the Home Directory Backup (which, according to the GUI interface is not a full backup, yet the only way to create a Partial Backup is from the dialog clicked in the above Full Account Backup button.

It's fair to say most get what goes on behind the scenes, as things do work pretty well, regardless of how they do not present as amenable to spell out in logical or intelligible terms. Perhaps one or two minor edits in the cPanel interface would make for improved clarity at least. :)

Thanks.

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  quietFinn

  • March 09, 2024 13:48

  "A full backup creates an archive of all of your website’s files and configuration. You can use this file to move your account to another server or to keep a local copy of your files."

  You can use that backup to restore the account and it will be eaxactly the same as the account was when the backup was created.
  Full backup can only be restored by the root user, cPanel user can't restore it.

   

   

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  lmstearn

  • March 10, 2024 02:22

  Not armed with Admin access, there is nothing under Account Backups on the main backup page here, yet the docs only mention full backups associated with Account backups.

  Is it possible to snapshot a subset of the configuration, for example?

  Can it be read from the docs the possibility of populating cpbackup-exclude.conf with some items, and then clicking the full backup button? Sounds like quibbling, but isn't that a partial backup?

  It would be a more logical approach for the docs and gui maintainers to forget full and partial altogether and explain backups purely in terms of components, config and files, with the bolded note on the page (and in the docs) to the effect that config can only be restored by admins.

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  cPRex Jurassic Moderator

  • March 11, 2024 13:52

  There isn't a way to only backup a certain subset of the account.

  I wouldn't say that reading the cpbackup-exclude file constitutes a "partial" backup - it's still a full backup, with your specified files excluded.

  "Partial" pretty much means either the home directory or just a database, while a full backup means it has everything necessary to move your account to a different server.

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  lmstearn

  • May 21, 2024 10:28
  • Edited

  Good to know, personally, a convenient way of handling them is to 

  Generate a Full Backup

  This produces a gz file with the site files in the homedir folder and the database in the mysql folder, there is the option of extracting the tarball to remove unwanted files and directories, then recompressing before transferring it to local storage. The downside is to watch for the number of previous backups resident in homedir, as they will get backed up too.

  cPRex: Do all the gz files from the various backup methods have the same compression, or is there zero compression for some?

  Thanks. :)

  Edit: ah, it uses the same as gZip archive in File Manager, so looking at this again, probably not the best idea to use the homedir for backup storage - unless there is a limitation on bandwidth.

  Edit2: Well, in megabytes the original generated backup was 169.58, the homedir compressed to 166.03 and the mysql compressed 2.43 (both in gz), thus saving a whopping 1.12! The extra files in the generated backup don't amount to much, obviously, so best to leave alone.

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  cPRex Jurassic Moderator

  • May 21, 2024 12:59

  All the gz files have the same compression in the backup tool.

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