Backups

Backups are a crucial part of website administration. Any serious website developer or administrator will always have a backup of the website. The cPanel provides for generation of backups – full backups and partial backups of your hosted content.

Any time you make significant changes in your website, it is always a good habit to download a backup just before you start on the mega update and just after you successfully update the website.

Full account backup – generate, download and restore

To create a full backup of your web site by using cPanel, follow these steps:

1. Access the cPanel and go to Files>>Backups
2. Under Full Backup, click Download or Generate a Full Website Backup.
3. In the Backup Destination list box, select where you want to save the backup file.You can save the backup file in your home directory, or you can transfer the backup file to another site by using FTP or SCP. If you use FTP or SCP, you must specify the remote server details such as IP, username and password used to access the remote server.
4. Optionally, select the whether you want to be notified via email once the process is complete.
5. Click Generate Backup.

Once you have generated the full site backup, you can download the backup file.

To download a full backup, follow these steps:

1. In the Files section of the cPanel home screen, click Backups.
2. Under Full Backup, click Download or Generate a Full Website Backup.
3. Under Backups Available for Download, click the file that you want to download.

Once you have a copy of the desired backup offline, you can save it in your local machine and let it wait for a rainy day. To restore the backup:

1. Upload the backup to your home directory in the cPanel. You can use FTP or directly upload from the cPanel.
2. Open a ticket and make the request for us to restore your account using the backup provided.

NOTE:

1. Users with no root access to the server cannot restore a backup – hence the need for you to make the request to us.
2. The process of restoring a backup involves deletion of everything in the cPanel. As such, it is very crucial that you ascertain that all the desired content has been backed up OFFLINE. Anything in the cPanel will be replaced.

Partial account backup – generate, download and restore

The full backup of a cPanel account picks backs up all the data including settings of the current cPanel. Passwords, bandwidth statistics, account package details are all backed up along with the files. This of course takes up more space. But you may choose to have partial backups of the account instead. In the cPanel, you can make backups of the following areas independently:

• Home directory
• MySQL databases
• E-mail forwarders
• E-mail filters

To achieve this

1. In the Files section of the cPanel home screen, click Backups.
2. Under Partial Backups, click the name of the backup file that you want to download.

To restore an existing partial backup, follow these steps:

1. In the Files section of the cPanel home screen, click Backups.
2. Under Partial Backups, click Browse, select the partial backup file that you want to restore, and then click Upload.