Generating automatic full backups with CPanel

Generating backup

Each month, I take a full backup of my webfolder at http://www.jochenhebbrecht.be. It contains all webdata, as also a seperate SQL file for each of my databases. My host (http://www.vivior.net) offers me CPanel, which is giving me a lot of oppurtunities to do funky things. Up until today, I always manually logged in to CPanel, browsed to the Full backup wizard and started the job.

But today, I configured a cron job which does this job for me.

• Login to CPanel
• Go to the File Manager app and upload the following file - full_backup.sh - into your home directory:
  

  #!/bin/bash
  curl --user ##USERNAME##:##PASSWORD## https://##DOMAIN_NAME##/frontend/paper_lantern/backup/wizard-dofullbackup.html --data-binary $'------WebKitFormBoundaryGww39ElKNvLB43AS\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="dest"\r\n\r\nhomedir\r\n------WebKitFormBoundaryGww39ElKNvLB43AS\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="email_radio"\r\n\r\n1\r\n------WebKitFormBoundaryGww39ElKNvLB43AS\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="server"\r\n\r\n\r\n------WebKitFormBoundaryGww39ElKNvLB43AS\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="user"\r\n\r\##USERNAME##\r\n------WebKitFormBoundaryGww39ElKNvLB43AS\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="pass"\r\n\r\n##PASSWORD##\r\n------WebKitFormBoundaryGww39ElKNvLB43AS\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="port"\r\n\r\n\r\n------WebKitFormBoundaryGww39ElKNvLB43AS\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="rdir"\r\n\r\n\r\n------WebKitFormBoundaryGww39ElKNvLB43AS--\r\n' --compressed

• Provide the file execute permissions
• Now go to the Cron jobs app and add the following line. It will create a full backup the first day of the month:
  

  0 0 1 * *   sh ~/full_backup.sh

• A full backup is now generated to your homedir.

Automatic download of full backup

I'm running Drupal 7 on a local Ubuntu installation. I've created a simpel module which automatically downloads the file at the 2 day of the month (as the 1th day, the backup is generated). This is the script which you can reuse:

<?php
function ftp_downloader_cron() {
	if (date('d') == '2') {
		// Configuration
		$ftp_server = '##FTP_SERVER##';
		$ftp_user_name = '##FTP_USER##';
		$ftp_user_pass = '##FTP_PASSWORD##';
 
		// Set up basic connection
		$conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server);
 
		// Login with username and password
		$login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user_name, $ftp_user_pass);
 
		// Get all files in FTP home dir
		$files = ftp_nlist($conn_id, '.');
 
		// Get name of backup file
		foreach($files as $file) {
			if (preg_match("/^backup\-.*jochenhebbrecht\.tar\.gz/", $file)) {
				watchdog("jochus_ftp_downloader", "Found file: %file", $variables = array('%file' => $file), $severity = WATCHDOG_NOTICE, $link = NULL);
 
				// Download file
				if (ftp_get($conn_id, "##SERVER_LOCAL_PATH##/$file", $file, FTP_BINARY)) {
					watchdog("jochus_ftp_downloader", "Successfully downloaded file", $variables = array(), $severity = WATCHDOG_NOTICE, $link = NULL);
				} else {
					watchdog("jochus_ftp_downloader", "File could not be downloaded", $variables = array(), $severity = WATCHDOG_ERROR, $link = NULL);
				}
 
			}
		}
 
		// Close the connection
		ftp_close($conn_id);
	)
}