Storing Your Backups with Amazon S3 via WHM

Note that you will need root access in order to use these directions.

Backups are a vital part of any healthy website configuration. Unfortunately, valid backups are often neglected, or not kept. All too often there are mistakes, files get changed or deleted by mistake, hard drives fail, and so on. Keeping regular, valid backups helps to restore your data in one of these instances.

cPanel makes maintaining backups of your cPanel accounts easy. It does this via the Backup Configuration interface in your Web Host Manager( WHM ). WHM’s Backup Configuration provides lots of configuration options. One key option is the ability to store your backups off-server with Amazon S3.

Note: To setup Amazon S3 you will need your Secret Access Key. It is strongly recommended that you create an IAM User for your Amazon S3.

Sounds great! How do I store my backups with Amazon S3?

1. Login to WHM
2. 

   Open the Backup Configuration interface
3. 

   Click Enable
4. 

   Ensure that Backup Type is set to Compressed
5. 

   Choose your desired Scheduling and Retention options. You will need to review these options and decide what will work best for you. For example, if your site doesn’t update often, you may be able to backup once a month, or once a week. It is highly recommended to limit the number of backups that you keep to prevent using excess disk space.
6. 

   Select Backup Accounts and then click Select Users.
7. 

   In the new browser tab under the Backups column click the On/Off button to enable or disable your users’ backups.
8. 

   If desired, click to enable Backup System Files
9. 

   Under Additional Destinations ensure that the Destination Type is set to Amazon S3, and click Create new destination
10. 

    Fill in a descriptive Destination Name, the Bucket name of your Amazon S3 bucket that you wish to backup to, your Access Key ID, and the Secret Access Key
11. 

    Finally, click Save and Validate Destination

You should now see a success message confirming that WHM is able to communicate with Amazon S3. Next time WHM creates backups for your server you will see your backups as an ‘object’ in your S3 interface. Congratulations! You are now setup to automatically upload your backups to Amazon’s S3 service!