How to backup your Bluehost backups (or any other) to AWS and save on storage costs

Seems like no matter how much space you have, there is never enough for the giant backup files. On one of my VPS accounts I have this issue nearly ever week where I have to clean up. 
So without getting into too much detail this is basically what I did today:

1) I stopped all weekly backups from the WHM "Backup Configuration" page.
2) I deleted all weekly and monthly backup files from the server by SSHing in and going to the /backup/cpbackup/weekly directory ... And deleting the big tar file.
3) In the bottom of that same WHM "Backup Configuration" page I checked the "/scripts/postcpbackup" option and wrote the contents of that script. Which you'll find below:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$directory='/backup/cpbackup/daily/';
$filename='mybackup.tar';

$awsDir='/home4/myuser/phpbackupdir/';
$awsScriptPath='/home4/myuser/phpbackupdir/s3_backup.php';

chdir $directory;
`gzip -f $directory . $filename`;

chdir $awsDir;
`php5 $awsScriptPath`;

The above code basically compresses the file after it's been created. This alone will save you a huge amount of space.

Then it calls a php script that I downloaded from this site which uploads the resulting compressed file to Amazon S3. Admittedly I hacked that script a bit to comment out all the archiving since my bluehost account already does that for me. 

What I love about this is the postcpbackup script will automatically run after the backup is complete so I don't have to actually call that using a cron job.

I also added a mandrill bit to all this to send me an email when it's done. 

So what do I get with all this?

Well, I get to not only remove my monthly and weekly backups from the server saving me about 10GB, I also get to compress the daily file from about 5GB to 1.8GB which frees up another 3GB.

Not only that, I get to keep 30 days of backups on AWS (so like 60GB) and anytime I need to I can access that regardless of Bluehost being up or not.

What really surprised me was how fast the 1.8GB compressed file was transferred to AWS. I took about 2-3 minutes which is amazing speed. That must mean that Bluehost is basically hosted on AWS or they have a very big pipe for that transfer.

Either way, this 2 hour project is now going to save me $15/mo and provide me with 30 days of continuous full backups. 

You can figure out the hacks for yourself in the 33_backup.php script. If you need help, leave a comment below and I can help you figure it out.