Doing a full backup in CPanel
January 30th, 2010 shadminCPanel, which runs on all our Linux servers, and is used by 97% of our clients, have a built in backup utility which allows users to do a full backup of their sites within a few minutes and save it to their computers. We recommend clients to do backups regularly to be able to restore their sites in case of emergencies. Although most of our servers have a weekly backup system or have a RAID configuration, the reality is backups can fail. By following this quick guide you will be able to backup your site when you want.
The backup process as below:
1-Log into your control panel, with your username and password. Access url would probably be www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel
2-Under the “Files” category, click on “Backups”
3-Choose the first option, Full Backup (“Download or Generate a Full Website Backup)
4-Choose “Home Directory” as Backup Destination. You can also input an email address to be notified when the backup is completed.
5-You finally click on “Generate a Backup”. CPanel will start preparing a full backup of your site.
Once the backup is completed, you can come back to click on the download link. Choose a location on your hard drive and click OK. Depending of the size of your site and your internet speed, it can take some time for the download to complete.
In case of server emergency, you will simply need to provide this backup to our admins and the backup will be restored to the new server within half an hour on average. This would include all the site contents, e-mails etc.
Another way to do the backup would be to download directly the home directory files (second option on point 3 of the above guide) and the databases if any. In this case the site can only be restored manually and not by our admins automatically.
How often should you do a backup? This would depends of whether your site is dynamic or static. The more often your site contents are updated the shorter the period between backups. We recommend at least one backup per month for static sites and one per week for dynamic sites.
Finally, a full backup can be useful when you prepare to do some advanced changes to your site, or have a third party work on it. In case anything goes awry, you will can always have your site restored to its initial form by providing us with the full backup.
