I'm researching reseller hosting. Trying to figure out how to backup everyones' sites without having to pay for a backup service... initially. If things go OK, I'd eventually look into it. Is it possible to backup all the sites on a reseller host account on an external TB harddrive? If so, is there a way to automate the process?
The cheapest, most secure way to backup all your clients accounts would be to run Offsite Backups using Rsync.
I've written webbots to backup my clients' sites, using different bots for files and databases. In my spare time, I've played around with executing cpanel scripts via webbots, but with limited success so far, so I just do it all with php webbots and have my local server cron the downloads after the scripts have run. - Hank Castello, CompuSolver.com
If you have a cPanel server, what you can do is create a Ftp account on your local machine and use the Ftp details while backing up the account from cPanel >> Backup option. Once cPanel backs up the whole account, it will automatically send the backup file on your local machine. However, cPanel don't have an option to automate the backup process so you will have to initiate the backup yourself. Plesk do offer an option to schedule the backup btw.
Re: madaboutlinux's post: It depends on how cPanel is setup on the hosting server. In other words, some of the cPanel options are configurable by the hosts, and thus your particular host may have different options. But the original poster is asking about automated services of all his client's files. This requires some server-side code and a connection to your reseller software (WHM, etc.). There are several places on the web with scripts that seem to almost work. I haven't taken time to finish checking them all out yet, because I've found my custom bots to be more efficient.
I use some custom scripts for some accounts (mainly ones with large files) to copy all of the data to offsite backup accounts using Rsync. And a simple cron job makes everything automated so I don't have to worry about having to run the backup script manually. The disadvantage to making full backups of cPanel accounts is it causes high CPU load on the server. Where as when making incremental backups using Rsync, only newly uploaded/modified data is copied. Thus saves server resources like cpu/memory/diskspace/bandwidth, etc.
I use the Full cPanel Backup feature included in cPanel to backup my accounts to external locations. It's free, easy to use and most hosts provide this feature free of cost.
get into the cpanel of each account under the reseller account, download the backup file and store it on a folder on your computer, and later copy all those fles to your external drive simple