Note that this is assuming that you are root. (A non-root user won't have the permissions to read some of the contents of /etc/letsencrypt
.)
By the way, I'm not sure whether that backup advice is useful to everyone who uses Certbot. We've certainly had some people on the forum for whom it would have been useful (because they deleted /etc/letsencrypt
when something was misconfigured, and then ran into rate limit problems) but for some people's use cases it seems like we might not have gained much from this advice.
I appreciate @kato.von.katz's conscientiousness in wanting to follow the advice here. Most software's advice to make backups is probably ignored most of the time!