I had a thought

[drmike]

I had a thought a couple of days ago.  On CPanel and Direct Admin boxes, you can set it up to use a database and mysql user from a different account.  Not sure if this is a bug or not.  I would think it would be. 

What if folks put the mu install in one account and the mu files and upload into another?  Would make the backup process a little smoother since the zips would be smaller.  Would be easier to move dbs around if the site grew big as well.

[ron_r]

If you know the username & password (and security is not set up to prevent you) you should be able to access the database on any box.

zip has options to exclude files/folders. So, you could zip into several different files if you needed to.

[drmike]

If you know the username & password (and security is not set up to prevent you) you should be able to access the database on any box.

I politely disagree.  One of the "selling points" of CPanel is that each account is separate and there's no interaction between them.  What's in my account should not be accessed by another user.

And meaning zips, I mean downloading a backup from within CPanel or Direct Admin or whatever else you;re using.  You would only have to backup half of the site at one time.  One download would be the site files as well as uploads.  The other would be the db.

[ron_r]

From a web perspective cpanel's separating access is true. However, as an example, the root account has access to everything including the ability to gain access to all of the databases on the system.

On our VPS we only have 1 master instance of mysql running. All of our cPanel accounts use the same master  process to access mysql data. cPanel won't let our accounts access non-owned databases via phpmyAdmin. But, the mySQL server is not a child process of cPanel.