There are a few ways to back up your shared server account.
1. We do a daily backup of our shared servers for disaster recovery purposes. If you have an Enterprise 2.0 hosting plan, you can access your site files from within cPanel -> Files -> Backup Restoration.
*Due to the size of the server backups(up to 4TB each), we are unable to maintain more than two or three days worth of CDP backups for each server*
2. You can do a manual backup of your shared server account through cPanel -> Files -> Backups.
A Full cPanel backup contains all files necessary to completely restore your account to a cPanel server. A partial backup contains only the parts of your account that are specified (i.e. Databases, Home Directory, etc.)
There is no mechanism within cPanel at this time to automate backups of individual account, but we have found a php script which can be setup through cron to create a full cpanel backup and FTP it to a remote FTP server.
NOTE: You will need to install a FTP server onto a local machine, and set up an account for the script to FTP into to upload the backup. Filezilla has a free FTP server located at http://filezilla-project.org/ that clients have had good luck with.
The script can be copied from http://echo.securenet-server.net/~jdarow/backup.php.txt and pasted into a file called backup.php. Edit the configuration, upload the script file into your /home/username account, and give it 700 permissions.
DO NOT PLACE THIS FILE INTO YOUR PUBLIC_HTML FOLDER, AS IT MUST CONTAIN YOUR CPANEL USERNAME AND PASSWORD IN PLAINTEXT.
Here is the information which will need to be placed in the backup.php script, in the Configuration section:
1.cPanel username
2.cPanel password
3.Domain name
4.cPanel skin - Can be found by logging into cPanel, and looking at the URL. The skin name will be in the URL, to the right of /frontend/ i.e. http://example.com:2082/frontend/x3/login.php indicates the account is using the 'x3' theme.
5.Remote FTP username
6.Remote FTP Password
7.Remote FTP Hostname
8.FTPMode
9.Notification Email address
Once this has been edited and placed in your home directory with 750 permissions, you will need to create a cron job for this. Go to cPanel->Advanced Tools -> Cron Jobs, and select standard.
command to run: /usr/bin/php -v /home/USERNAME/backup.php > /dev/null 2>&1
Make sure to replace USERNAME with your actual user name. You can configure this to run whenever you like, but we recommend running the script once a week. This will allow you to keep a recent backup, without cluttering up your local server or causing any load issues on the server.