cpanel Backup Clean up

One of the major pluses of cPanel that it doesn’t delete the backup of the account when terminating an account and neither it does remove it on the next backup run, while that can be a good thing if the customer comes back, on the long term, the backup drive starts to slowly run out of space and eventually these big accounts that have been stored for a while will need to be removed. I had to go cleanup the backup of one of the servers and I was not about to read them account-by-account however I have used my basic bash coding skills to whip up a small code that helps me in the process!

The code isn’t long at all and it isn’t anything genius, first I generate a small list of the accounts that are in the backup directory, we only run weekly backups and our backup is mounted at /backup so here is the command that we used first:

ls /backup/cpbackup/weekly/ > accts.backup

Now, a small loop that I created so that it filters out all the users that are in the backup directory but are not existent on the server anymore (or do not have the same username).

for i in `ls /home/`; do replace $i '' -- accts.backup ;done

There was a lot of accounts to be removed or deleted as this servers’ backups have been left hanging for a while so it would be a very hard task to actually find the accounts that have high disk usage so I made the following script that takes the size of each one of the accounts and puts it in a file.

for i in `cat accts.backup`; do du -sh $i ;done > accts.size


After that, we make our life a lot easier by sorting the results by the size, however, there is one dangerous thing I warn you from, the “dirs” directory might appear as the biggest one but it contains usually MySQL files and configuration files which are very important, you should simply ignore it.

sort –n accts.size > accts.sorted

Now, you have a file with all the accounts that do not exist on the server but have backups with their size sorted, you can just go and clean them up as you go, until then, I go back to erasing these useless space hogs!