How to Backup and Restore Files

This tutorial shows you how to backup your website files, databases and email settings, and how to restore them yourself, without needing to contact us at all.

Taking a backup of your website is crucial - yet so many website owners are caught out every year after losing their data. Our servers automatically backup your entire hosting account every night, but this is mainly to protect against a total server failure so that we can restore everyone's sites onto new hardware, losing no more than 24hrs worth of data. We can restore your information from our daily backups, but this only contains the most recent 24hrs worth of data.

What if your site was hacked 2 or more days ago, and you never noticed? Then we wouldn't have a clean backup to restore. Of course, you could take up our secure weekly offsite backups which would buy you seven days worth of backups to roll back, but if you don't have this luxury then the best course of action is to take your own backups and keep them safe. In fact, if you have a website that relies on content management, then you should be doing this once a week at least!

The backup process

• Log-In to cPanel
• Click Backup Wizard
• Click Backup
• Choose to perform one of the Partial Backups on the right hand side.

Just repeat the above until you have backed up the Home Directory, MySQL Databases and Email Forwarders and Filters.

Note: The Full Backup facility, although a complete backup of your site - is in a format that won't allow you to automatically restore your site directly. This is mainly intended for use if you were moving to another server.

To restore your site

• Log-In to cPanel
• Click Backup Wizard
• Click Restore
• Choose to perform one of the partial restores, carefully selecting the correct backup file each time.
  

By restoring your Home Directory, MySQL Databases and Email Forwarders and Filters 

Give it a go

Go ahead and backup your entire hosting account using the methods above. Keep the backup files in a safe place, and preferably keep it in two places (on your computer, and another copy on a memory stick in a fire safe at home, for example). If you ever talk to anyone who has lost a website and didn't take backups, you will appreciate how critical this is!