RWT Webmaster Tools Blog

How to use cPanel to backup your website

You’ve heard it a million times. BACKUP YOUR DATA!

The question is, are you?? If you are not, you really need to be doing so.

Again, let me repeat, you really need to be backing up your website.

Beginners probably have their website hosted on a shared environment with cPanel running as the administrative tool. You can easily backup your website (files and databases) with cPanel. Here’s how:

1. Go to www.yoursitedomain.com/cpanel

   

2. Enter your username and password – if you do not know this information please contact your web host.

   

3. Click the ‘Backup’ icon located on the main screen

   

4. Click ‘Generate/Download a full backup’

   

5. The “Full Backups” screen will display

   

6. Select your backup location (choose Home Directory)

   

7. Make sure your email address is correctly entered (once the backup is complete you will be emailed)

   

8. Click Generate Full Backup button

   

9. Backup file will be created in your home directory

   

10. Once the full backup of your account has been completed you will receive an email message to the email address you specified

If you cPanel looks different from above don’t freak. Some web hosts setup cpanel differently. Here is an example:

1. Look for a main toolbar icon labled “Tools”
   
2. Click “Backup” from the left menu
   
3. Follow instructions above starting with number four (4).

The backup file will be created on your home root directory. It will be a tar.gz file. This file can then be FTPed off your server to a local drive or CD (or both!) for safe keeping. I recommended doing this weekly at the LEAST.

You will have noticed during this process something stating the following (or something similar):

Full Backups allow you to save a complete, compressed copy of all of your site data either to your home directory locally or remotely to an FTP server. Full backups CANNOT be restored by CPanel automatically. Only your server administrator can restore a full backup automatically. If you want to be able to use CPanel to restore your backup files, you must use the separate HOME, SQL, ALIASES and FILTERS backup features, and then you can restore them below.

While this is a true statement keep in mind the following:

• The full backup contains A LOT of information. It contains MORE than you NEED but ALL that you WANT.
• Don’t worry! While this file cannot be restored automatically via cPanel, the correct pieces can be extracted and restored manually. It is just one huge zip file. Know that every file has been backedup as well as SQL statements generated for recreating and restoring databases.

Using cPanel to backup your website piece by piece is a post for another day!

[tags]backups, backup, website, web, cpanel[/tags]