cpanel site backups bad?

[Tony]

Is anyone else finding it impossible to extract site backups locally?

I used to use 7-zip to extract, but now I get errors. I've tried this on a couple different local machines with the same result.

I haven't yet tried to extract on the server.

[Taras O.]

Hi Tony,

Can you please specify which errors 7-zip gave you?

[Tony]

"Data error in 'backup*.tar'. File is broken

After posting I tried extracting a backup from my other host and that works fine, so I opened ticket #LLO-686766. So far tech support is unable to fix the problem, but they have suggested a couple workarounds.

• use jail shell to pack a tar of my own and download it
• create a full backup in cpanel and download that

Option #1 would be way too much trouble to do manually every month, so would require scripting. I can live with option #2, but it does make a backup file nearly twice the size.

My biggest worry is for anyone else that doesn't know about this and is relying on their local backups. Like myself when I carefully made a (bad!) backup before upgrading to vbulletin 4. Maybe we should post notices somewhere.

[Tony]

I see another problem with broken backups. In order to do the workaround suggested (full site backups), it generates a file 3X the size, which resides in my directory. I just hope after a few months of these WHB doesn't complain I'm using too much disk space!