Offsite generating DirectAdmin backups

What is it?

This script is by far complete, but it's purpose is to generate a tarred and gzip'ed backupfile, restorable by a DirectAdmin controlpanel, but made without DirctAdmin.

Can I use it?

Sure, but if you do, I assume you have a backupserver with partly rsync'd copies of several directadmin servers. The more the marrier.

Why would I?

Why would you want to generate a DirectAdmin compatible backup if the controlpanel itself is already capable enough to do this?

Well, if you can't think of a reason, let's name a few:

• if you have many servers in need of daily backups, the way to go is to use rsync because it only transfers changed files (or parts of them). Most of the times this gives you blazingly fast speeds and you have a nice file by file backup. For free. But even though restoring a full server is easy, restoring a single user is more of a pain in the ***. This script should lighten that burden a bit.
• You only need the DirectAdmin backup in tar.gz format IF you need to restore a user. (Remember you're still rsyncing everything every day). As long as you don't actually NEED the backupfile, you're only wasting space and cpu cycles.
• Reading from SSD's is cheap. Writing is expensive. Rsyncs read, da backups write. See what I mean? In our case more than 90% of the writes on our ssd storages are from generating DA backups. Even saving 50% on writes will make your SSD's last a lot longer.
• Why waste space on servers for the storage (and the building of) the tar.gz files? No more worries about 'disk out of space' messages and failed backups because there is that one big user.
• Well, that should be enough for now :)

Should I use it?

At your own risk? Sure! Give it a shot, but make sure you understand exactly what it does and know that besides two trivial parameter checks, this script checks nothing. I repeat NOTHING. You'd be stupid to run this as root, even though I do...

YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN!

P.S. It would be great if others (with more knowledge of the DA backup internals) would join in.