Recreating a Wordpress website

Crunchy

Member
I have someone that contacted me for a Wordpress website in March but didn't get back to me about it until recently. All I did in March was create the site with the default Wordpress theme, add a few email accounts, and then I immediately back it up through CPanel (hd, sql db and forwarders).

I have recently moved the email accounts to a third party email service, and deleted the email accounts from the VPS.

Today, I went to backup the site again after updating to Wordpress 4.0 and the home directory downloaded as only 6.4mb. That seems strange since the site originally backed up to like 33mb in March and my other sites still backup in the 30ish mb range. It also gave me an error the first time I tried to update Askimet.

Even though the website appears fine in a browser and CPanel says it is occupying just under 30mb of hard drive space, I am a bit leery of moving forward if it is compromised. I'm thinking I could empty the web root and restore the original backup or even redo the site from scratch.

Would either one of these options mess with the third party email accounts?

The only thing I have to do if I delete and recreate the account would be to delete the account and then check the box in the account creation wizard that says "Overwrite any existing DNS zones for the account" when I recreate the account, correct?

Am I being overly paranoid here? It just doesn't make any sense that the account currently backs up to 6.4mb....
 
Hey @Crunchy

When comparing the back up sizes (33mb vs 6~mb) are these both home directories only? Or is the 33mb backup a full cPanel backup? The full backup will always be considerably larger as it contains all of the account's information (MySQL databases, email accounts and content, etc).

If you restore the original backup it will probably re-write the email configurations as you had it before (remove the remote mail services), however simply restoring the home directory and MySQL database will not have an affect on the mail accounts.

As for the check box option in the wizard, that should be just fine if that's the route that you decide to take.

"Am I being overly paranoid here?"
No such thing. However, you can always open a ticket with the Support Department and we'll be glad to give it a once over, or feel free to choose a contact method from my signature and I'll be glad to help as well.
 
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