Seems that a lot of people ask on how they can initiate cPanel backup procedure using just SSH and not WHM.
To be honest, once you are familiar with SSH usually it’s a lot easier to just fire a command than connect to WHM and start clicking here and there in order to find something you need.
Since we are building a knowledge base here, rather than a community forum (community forums are somehow not so familiar those days) we will update the article posted on our main site here.
Despite the huge price increase in 2019 cPanel/WHM remains the number 1 commercial Control Panel for Linux Servers all over the globe.
It’s true that cPanel is mature enough to provide a GUI that many people find a lot easy to deal with for more complex procedures when it comes to Managed Hosting.
What’s great is that you can also use a lot of those scripts that work under the GUI for cPanel from the command line.
Let’s see here how you can initiate the cPanel Backup (that you already have configured through WHM) to run in case something didn’t work well on the previous run or just because you need a fresh re-run.
Once you are connected to your server you can initiate the cPanel Backup using the following line, which is actually a cPanel Script.
Use the following line to initiate cPanel/WHM backup
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/backup
If you get a message that cPanel backup is already updated you just need to apply –Force
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/backup –force
