After weeks of investigation by the admin support staff we only came to the single conclusion …

• the mysql backup of the WHM/Cpanel backup feature simply corrupts the backup after some megabytes or a few million records… not designed for real backup…
• also it only creates a single daily, a single weekly backup file – no history concept

So the only conclusion was to do a manual script for backing up because the licensed, full-fledged product in use at thousands of websites is just defect … what a mess..

I was lucky to find the shell script AutoMySQLbackup at sourceforge that saved me from implementing what I expect from a backup script (especially if I pay for it!!)

• Backup mutiple MySQL databases with one script. (Now able to backup ALL databases on a server easily. no longer need to specify each database seperately)
• Backup all databases to a single backup file or to a seperate directory and file for each database.
• Automatically compress the backup files to save disk space using either gzip or bzip2 compression.
• Can backup remote MySQL servers to a central server.
• Runs automatically using cron or can be run manually.
• Can e-mail the backup log to any specified e-mail address instead of "root". (Great for hosted websites and databases ).
• Can email the compressed database backup files to the specified email address. So you always have your important databases in your inbox … you can delete them later – and you can specify a maximun size backup to email.
• Choose which day of the week to run weekly backups.
• Rotates daily backups by weekday – means you have exactly 6 daily backups there from 1 to 5 days old
• Keeps 5 weekly archives
• Keeps monthly archives forever (manual deleting)

Perfect… just this morning I found my database backup to be completed successfully… for the first time using CPANEL a complete mysql backup…