Xavier Media®

If you got cPanel as your hosting control panel you got several ways of creating off site backups.

Please note the off site part above since keeping your backups on the same server (and maybe even in the same account as your site) is extremely dangerous (see my last post).

To make a backup of your account, please login at cPanel and click on the backup icon:

Now you got several options for your backup. You can do a full backup of all files in your account, just your files and just your databases.

Full backup

Lets start with the full backup. This backup can't be restored by you from the cPanel, you need SSH access to the server and access to WHM, WebHosting Manager (the admin interface). But if you lost all your files in your account your server provider should be able to help you as a onetime service (if you don't need this every day that is) and if they're not interested in helping you you just get an account with someone else and tell them to setup your account with the full backup .

The full backups can be sent to another FTP account without any need for you to download the actual file which is really good. Just select "Remote FTP Server" as backup destination and fill in your FTP details.

When you've filled in the details you jut hit the "Generate Backup" button and wait. If you filled in a valid email address in the email field you will get an email when your backup is ready.

Please make sure you're sending your backup to another FTP account on another server then your actual site!!!!!! If you need a second FTP account on another server you get 5Gb space for only $3.40/month at eXavier.com. If you got two sites on different accounts you can use the account for site A as backup destination for site B and vice versa, but please make sure the accounts are on different servers because otherwise a hard drive failure on the server will erase both your site and backup !!!

Partial backups

Partial backups are backups on parts of your site like your home directory (all your files) or your databases. These backups can easily be restored by you directly for cPanel without any help from a server admin. The downside is that you have to download the files and you have to download several files (one for th home directoy, on for each and every of your databases), but it's still better then to lose your site completely.

To do a partial backup of your files, simply just select the backup icon in cPanel and scroll down to "Partial Backups". Now you should see something like this:

On the left side you see buttons and links to download your partial backups, and on the right side you'll find tools to upload your backups again. If you got serveral databases like in the example above you need to download several files (one for each database). Just click on the links and the buttons to start downloading your files.

The beaty with this is that you can restore just one database or all your databases yourself so if you're going to work on the database structure it could be a good idea to make a backup here first just in case you f*ck up something (I got personal experience of that ).

In part two of this article series I will teach you how to do backups in WHM (WebHosting Manager).

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.