Internet Business with Pat Doyle

Photo by Gaetan Lee

Now that I am getting involved with web hosting, I have been thinking a lot about backups.

Do you back up all your websites? You should!

Your web host might or might not do backups. If they do backups, you don’t know how often they do it. Also, their backups might get lost or be unusable for various reasons. You should not trust your host to do your backups — you should always do your own backups as well.

So how do you do it? If your host has cPanel, this is pretty easy. Sign in to your cPanel, and look for the “Backups” icon.

On the Backups page, you will see two sections.

Full Backup

The first section is called “Full Backup”. This backs up your entire site, including any databases. The only problem is that you can’t restore these yourself. You need to contact your host to do the restore. Still, it could come in handy, and it backs up everything you have into one file.

When you click on the button for the Full Backup, you will see a lot of choices. Don’t be confused. You will not need to fill in most of the fields.

The easiest thing to do is to leave the Backup Destination as “Home Directory”. Fill in your email address if you want to be notified when the backup is done. Then click the “Generate Backup” button.

When you go back to this screen later, when the backup is done, you will see the backup you have taken, under “Backups Available for Download”.

Now you can just click on this file and download it to your computer. You need to do this step of downloading it, because otherwise the backup is just sitting on your host’s server, so if there is a server problem, your backup could be lost too.

Once you have it downloaded to your home computer, you are all set. To be even more careful, you could make a copy of it and store it somewhere else as well (on a zip drive or offsite).

Home Directory Backup

The next section is “Partial Backups”, and under that, the first thing you can do is a “Home Directory Backup”. This will back up all your files and folders, but not your databases.

Just click on the “Home Directory” button, and it will give you a zipped file to download to your computer.

If you need to restore this file later, you can just upload it again under “Restore a Home Directory Backup”.

MySQL Database Backup

If you have any databases, which you will have if you have WordPress installed, you will also need to do a “MySQL Database Backup”. Just click on the database name under “Databases”, and you will get a zipped backup to download.

As before, you just upload and restore it under “Restore a MySQL Database”.

Just be aware, if your server is totally wiped out, you will lose your Database User as well. You will need to create the user and assign the user to the database manually. You do this in cPanel under “MySQL Databases”. I won’t go into detail on this now, but you would look in your wp-config.php file to get the username and password for the user.

It is because of this manual stuff that has to be done, that a “Full Backup” is easier - everything is included. But it requires you to get your host to restore it.

Other Backups

The Backups page in cPanel has two more sections, for “Email Forwarders” and “Email Filters”. If you have either of those set up, you can do backups of those too. They are backed up and restored in the same way as the other Partial Backups. I have never used these myself, but they should be easy to do.

Backup Schedule

So set up a schedule for yourself, and do your backups!

For WordPress, if all you are doing is adding posts, then all you really need to back up often is the database. The other stuff will stay pretty much the same and can be backed up less frequently.

Just don’t neglect this altogether. Even if you only take backups occasionally, at least you will have something to start from if you lose your site, instead of starting from scratch.

– Pat Doyle

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