Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Per-Subdomain Backups, specifically the underscore backup folder.

The core idea here is straightforward. On the NZRT server, each subdomain — things like your WordPress site, your Dolibarr ERP, your Nextcloud instance, and your mail service — each one has its own dedicated backup folder sitting right inside it. This keeps your backup history clean and separated by service, so you always know exactly where to look when something goes wrong.

Let’s talk about what that folder looks like. Inside each subdomain’s backup folder, you’ll find three subfolders. First, there’s a daily folder, which holds your automated daily snapshots. Second, there’s a weekly folder for automated weekly archives. And third, there’s a manual folder — this is where on-demand backups go, the ones you run yourself before a major update or a migration. Simple, clean, and predictable.

Now, where are these folders actually located on the server? There are four main subdomains covered. For WordPress, the backup path lives under the main nzrtnetwork.com folder in the server’s web root. For Dolibarr, it’s under the erp subdomain folder. For Nextcloud, it’s under the cloud subdomain folder. And for mail, it’s under the mail subdomain folder. Each one follows the same pattern — the subdomain’s root folder, then the backup folder inside it. You access these through WebDAV, using the SSL port 2078 to connect, then drilling down into whichever subdomain you need. If you’ve already mapped a network drive through cPanel’s WebDAV interface, that same approach applies here.

Naming your backup files consistently is really important, and NZRT has a clear convention for this. Each filename has three parts: the service name, the type of backup, and the date in year-month-day order, finished off with a compressed archive extension. So you might see something like wordpress-files followed by a date, or dolibarr-db followed by a date with an sql dot gz extension, or nextcloud-full followed by a date. At a glance you know what service it covers, what kind of backup it is, and exactly when it was made.

Let’s look at the schedule. The daily folder gets a new snapshot every single day, and you keep the last seven — so a rolling week of daily backups. The weekly folder runs every Monday and retains four files, giving you roughly a month of weekly history. Both of these are automated through JetBackup or a scheduled cron job, so you don’t have to think about them. The manual folder is different. You fill it yourself whenever you need to — typically right before a major update or a migration — and you clear it out once you’re confident those files are no longer needed.

It’s worth understanding how these per-subdomain backup folders relate to the root-level wordpress-backups folder that also exists on the server. That root-level folder is managed entirely by cPanel and JetBackup automatically — you don’t set it up or maintain it yourself. The per-subdomain backup folders are completely separate and in addition to that. Think of the cPanel folder as a safety net running quietly in the background, and the per-subdomain folders as the organised, scripted backups that follow NZRT’s naming convention and that you have direct control over. Over time, the per-subdomain setup becomes your primary reference, while the cPanel folder remains your fallback.

Finally, an important security point. Because these backup folders sit inside each subdomain’s web root, they are technically reachable from the internet unless you explicitly block them. You do not want anyone browsing your backup files. The fix is to add a single rule to the subdomain’s htaccess file — a directive that returns a 403 Forbidden response for any request targeting the backup folder path. Alternatively, you can handle this through cPanel’s File Manager by setting the folder permissions to non-executable. Either approach works. The key is to do this before your apps go fully live, so those backup archives are never exposed publicly.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.