Backups are a crucial part of any hosting plan. The panic and worry of a site crashing can keep a website owner up at night. For many people, a website is more than a digital presence, a website is means of survival. Whether their site sells widgets or is ad sponsored, losing data is unacceptable. cPanel strives to provide a solution for backups, but the current system is old and needed to be reworked.
I recently got a few minutes with the team and asked them some important questions about the new backup system and how it will make the entire backup process better.
Why did the backup system receive updates?
The main reason is the system has not been updated since 2004. We wanted to include support for things like SFTP, WebDav, and arbitrary custom destinations. We also wanted to streamline the amount of time spent on the page.

Does part of the arbitrary custom destinations cover Amazon S3 support?
Not out of the box, but you can easily write something for it. We have full documentation for the custom destination system and we even included an example.
Have you made improvements to how backups are scheduled?
We have made dramatic improvements to the scheduling system. You can now specify what day or days of the week a daily backup runs as well as how many retentions you wish to keep. You can also run monthly backups on either the 1st or 15th and again set how many to retain.
What changes were made to the Account Restorations UI?
The UI has been consolidated to a single page, and it is much easier to use. The restorations are selected and done with a handy calendar to ease the process.

Is pigz included?
Erin worked on pigz for the Package Accounts script and saw a dramatic increase in speed for compressed accounts. She saw a two-thirds improvement in time. Since the Package Account script is used by the backup system, we leverage it for streamlining the process.
How will this affect the users of the old backup system?
The Legacy system is still in place and can be used concurrently. We did a massive amount of testing to ensure that both systems work together fine. However, we do strongly recommend you use the new backup system.
Can local and remote backups be used at the same time?
Absolutely. We opted to provide the option for both. Restorations from remote backups need to be done manually, and we have some fine documentation for this process.
Are there any other cool things we should know?
Yes! We have a few extra cool things:
- MySQL backups are included in all three backup selections.
- System Backups can now be stored remotely.
- Security is a concern as the backup is not encrypted.
- A remote restoration can be done manually and we have documentation to walk you through this process.
The backup improvements project should be in 11.38. You can look forward to it coming to cPanel & WHM very soon.
