7 replies to this topic

[dhanesh]

Ok .. herez what i want to do, I want to COMPLETELY flush out unwanted files and folders out of the account and start fresh. So either 2 things are possible, One .. m^e .. hi .. hehe .. an admin has to clean up or reset my account .. OR .. i need a list of files i can delete, which are :

public_html
tmp
mail
public_ftp

and any file or folder that begins with dot "."

(that was m^e's reply when i first joined )
But say in .htpasswds i have a folder thats without a dot and is empty .. can i del that ?
.contactemail, .spamkey etc .. what are these .. can i del them ?

Or a simple way is to request a reset ..

Regards
Dhanesh.

[vhortex]

i think those starting with a dot are support files.. i dunno.. i never had them in my setup of apache..
this are the folders that can be purged..

public_html <-- all pages are here
do not delete cgi-bin inside that folder..

public_ftp <-- the ftp server without that you share to public.. can be purge..

tmp <-- scratch.. temp folder..

mail <-- plain emails.. i dunno if you can just delete this one without deleting the corresponding email account.. on my fedora it was safe to delete all contents here since my fedora rebuilds the email accounts after wards..

fantastico_backups <-- i know you can remove this also.. need some verification first..

all folders starting with _ in the public_html must not be deleted if one of your program are using them.. i dunno what they are but when i have a frontpage support with my fedora.. those files appeared.. ask the admins if they can be deleted..

---

hope it helps...

[vujsa]

Here is what I can tell you.

You can delete anything that you want but your account may no longer work.

Nearly everything in /username/home/ should be kept. I wouldn't delete anything here since you didn't personally put anything there in most cases. Nothing gets installed there.

You can delete everything in /username/home/public_ftp/. Nothing is there by default and nothing is installed there either.

Now before you do anything else, uninstall any scripts that were installed using fantastico. Be sure to uninstall these scripts with the fantastico remove feature or you'll have to manually remove the entries from the install log before you can install another script with fantastico in that folder/subdomain/root. Really, you don't want to have to manually edit that file.

Once you have everything uninstalled CORRECTLY, then you can remove ALL subdomains. Don't just delete the folders. Use cPanel to remove the subdomains. If you just delete the folder, then the server wont know that you no longer have the subdomain.

Again in cPanel, remove any or ALL email accounts that you no longer need.

Remove as many advanced website settings you have selected like hotlink protection, forwarding, password protected folders, etc. (These will basically be gone when you delete any .htaccess files but removing them first will leave fewer chances of missing something.)

Delete your databases and database users. Even though fantastico removes scripts, it usually forgets to delete the database that it added. Databases use up a lot of space especially if it isn't needed.

Now you can safely delete everything inside of /username/home/public_html/! You can even delete cgi-bin/ if you want! to save yourself the time needed to select everything, you could just delete public_html/. I know everyone else will tell you not to. It isn't that big of a deal, just replace it later. I'll explain in a second. You should probably save a copy of .ftpquota and error_log to your local system.

Well, there you go, everything is all gone. Back to square one.

Now if you did happen to take my advise and you did in fact delete public_html then I really sorry to tell you that I was just kidding! No, just create a new folder and name it public_html. Then open that up and create a folder and name it cgi-bin. The you can copy .ftpquota and error_log back to your public_html folder.

Okay, you're done with that. It will take between 24 and 48 hours but your disk usage should show around 25MB or less. I don't remember how much space an "empty" account uses.

Feel free to repopulate your account now.

Hope This Helps!

vujsa

[dhanesh]

Thankx Vhortex and Vujsa ..

Ok, well here is what i normally do if i want to clean up: Delete EVERYTHING inside public_html, now that includes the cgi-bin folder and the .htaccess file, i have noticed that it gets recreated again when i refresh.

Now after readin vujsa's post, i have a clear question in mind. Is my Disk space of 150mb counted on things inside public_html ? or inside /home/

I have nothing to loose, no added settings, no fantastico add-ons .. i just have 2 mail accounts, but no mails in them either, i made them for testing. So basically i am willing to loose it all. But not at the cost of making my account non-responsive. I was just paranoid about being a little organized ..

Regards
Dhanesh.

[vujsa]

Your 150MB is counted for everything inhome/ and in your database.

A "BLANK" account has overhead like server settings, account information, etc. The database also has overhead without having anything in it. So of your 150MB, maybe only 135MB is YOURS!

There is a file somewhere that holds very important information about your cPanel account. I can't remember which one so I wouldn't delete any of the files and folders in home/


These files are not the bulk of your overhead. They won't save you much room if you delete them so I wouldn't suggest doing so.

vujsa

[dhanesh]

lol .. f'get it .. u scared the sh*t outa me about the account, so its all fine. I'll stick to my current files and settings .. but thankx for all that extra info, i'll be careful not to delete any files without re-checking what it is for .. lol

Regards
Dhanesh.

[vhortex]

it was 143MB on my account when i erase all.. that is.. i have an email account setup with contents and a database around 1mb in size..

maybe the overhead was around 5mb.. not sure..

[dhanesh]

Disk usage 1.64 / 150.00 MB
Disk space available 148.36 MB

Thats after an entire cleanup, as in just deleting stuff in public_html .. guess its more .. but i think the overhead value would be approx 1MB ..

Regards
Dhanesh.