Do Full Backups of Wordpress Regularly To Avoid Website Catastrophe!
It is essential that you frequently do full backups of your Wordpress website or blog and store the output away form your site, so that you have a whole copy of your site that you can restore in full should anything unfortunate happen to your site or the web server it is hosted on.
There is a unwritten rule in IT that states “If it can happen, it will happen” and you should heed this warning with everything you do with your website and blogs, because if you do not then at some time or other something bad will happen that will make you wish you did!
You can never plan for what might go wrong, such as server failure, someone hacking your site or even a natural disaster such as a major flood or hurricane. So be prepared. It always pays to be safe rather than sorry, and with anything computer related that is even more true.
Backing Up Wordpress is Easy with Cpanel!
Yes, you really have no excuse for not backing up your Wordpress sites as doing it with cPanel is just so simple and quick.
Just log in to the Cpanel account for your Wordpress website and look for the Backups icon.
Click on this Backups icon within Cpanel and you will be taken to the Full Backups page:
Do a Full Website Backup from Cpanel
To create a full backup of the whole of your website, which includes the total folder/directory structure for the site, all the Wordpress files, the complete MySql database that Wordpress uses and any images or documents used on you site, you must Generate and Download a Full Backup.
The other 3 backups listed are for a backup that does not include the database, just the MySql database on it’s own or the email account on it’s own. But for full secure protection of your website you need to do the FULL backup.
Just click on the link Generate / Download a Full Backup and this will initiate another screen with a small form of details for you to fill:
Select the first Backup destination for the backup location as “Home Directory” (the default). This will produce the backup file in the home or root directory on your website
Also add your email address so that when the backup process completes (it may take some time) you will be emailed to tell you that it has completed.
The other details in the form allow you to locate the backup output on a different server using ftp, but we are not interested in doing this as we just want to get the backup copy downloaded to your pc.
Click on Generate Backup to start the full backup of your Wordpress website.
This will automatically start the backup process and will generate the Backup TAR file on to your website at your web host so that you can later download the backup file to your laptop or personal computer.
While the backup is in progress you will see this message…
When you get the email confirming that your backup has completed click on the [ Go Back ] link in the above ‘Full Back Up In Progress” message and you will see the previous “Full Backup” screen, which should now also include a link to the Backup Files that has just been generated…
You will find this link to your new Backup TAR file under “Previous full backups saved in home directory:”
Store Your Website Backup on Your Computer
Just click on the backup link to download it and save it on your personal computer or laptop.
eg: backup-12.20.2008_22-14-04_mauiseoe.tar.gz
This will open a new small “Save File” window and you should select Save File and click OK to download it…
The full backup tar file will then be downloaded to the default download location on your pc.
That’s it – You are done!
Total Website Security in Just a Couple of Clicks!
Now you have a fully backed up Wordpress website that you can restore from to create your site at your current host, or even a new web host, at any time you want.
If you do this you will get an identical copy of your Wordpress website on any web host you choose (assuming of course that they support Wordpress – choose Hostgator if you are in any doubt).
How good does that feel?
And it only took a couple of clicks to get it done!!!
You should set up a regular schedule for backing up all your websites in this way, whether they are Wordpress sites, HTML sites or anything else.
Losing a site really is a situation you never want to be in as getting it back online can be a very frustrating experience. It can take a long time to do and lose you a lot of money in lost revenue.
For even better protection against losing your site you should also make copies of the tar backup files on a separate external hard disk that you can keep stored in a safe location, in case you have a problem with your personal computer or laptop.
BACKUP UP OFTEN
You should also backup your site both before and after you do any major changes to it.
If you are just adding posts or pages then you should do an Export from Wordpress to create a copy of all your posts and pages in XML format, so that you can import them directly into a new Wordpress site if you need to. Your own Wordpress site could become corrupted and this is good practice to ensure you do not ever lose valuable content.
BETTER TO BE SAFE THAN SORRY!
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Powerful stuff.
My host uses cpanel, which I used for setting up my Wordpress website.
This looks like a great way to do a full backup.
What is the .tar.gz extension that the saved file is saved as?
Plus… is the file left on your host server, taking up disk space. Would it be better to delete it from the host server?
Thanks for this. However, in your article on 10 must-have plug-ins you mention “WP DB Backup”. Which is the better method? Or have I missed the point?
Felicity
Thanks for the clear step-by-step on backing up my WP site. I’m at the point where it would be devastating to lose my database. I appreciate the motivation to backup regularly. Cheers.
Hi Felicity – WP DB Backup is useful as you can set it up to schedule backups of your Wordpress MySQL database and even get it to email them to you. It is different than the full cpanel backup in that it only backs up the database and not the whole of your Wordpress installation like cpanel can. However, having a regular copy of your database sent to you is a good strategy because once you set it up you can forget about it and the only downside is that it does not backup any images you have uploaded into Wordpress, as these are not saved in the database, but in the wp-content/uploads folder. Hope this made sense!?
Keith – Files with extension tar.gz or .tgz are tar files compressed with gzip and they will need to be uncompressed before they can be used. You will need to get your web host tech support to restore your site from one of these full backup files as you cannot do this yourself from within cpanel. Only delete the files from the server if you need the space.
How would you do a full restore with the backup you have saved to your computer..
Thanks..
David – you just need to get the Wordpress full backup copy you have on your computer to your web host and ask them to restore your site from it – it’s easy and they can do it in a couple of minutes – so submit a support ticket to them to get it done!
Very useful. Someone on the forum I am on has just lost a load of sites as they were hacked. I had never backed mine up !. Have now. Thanks again
Si
I just did full backup. How would I do incremental backup with my files. Like sync my backup files with current website. Do I have to run full backup (weekly for example) then delete the old backup from my home folder then generate a new backup and so on?
@ Keith – These are full backups, not incremental. So you always do a full backup. The file name of the backup .tar file will have the date in it so you can see when it was taken. Every time you do a full cpanel backup a new .tar backup file with a different name (because of the date part) is created. You only need to delete the old ones if you get short on storage space. Hope that helps…
Hi Dave,
I’ve never backup my site, so I’m really happy to have landed here and found your tutorial. Thanks to you, I’ve just ‘Export’ my posts/pages as you’ve advised – easily done as I just discovered this feature under ‘Tools’ at site-admin (hmm….didn’t know its existence before, what a dummy I am?)
Now, to backup my site with cPanel – I just don’t know how-to even though your instructions seemed quite simple. Reason being, I just can’t find the cPanel to login..where is it located, at site-admin? Please help as I’m not that technie-savvy at all but very keen to learn and improve.
Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks a lot!
@Jacqueline – Couple of quick questions: What type of web hosting account do you have (shared, reseller, other) ? Do you know if it uses cpanel ?
Hi Dave,
Just know that my website is maintained under my son’s account and I don’t know the technical aspect of it. Anyway, I met up with my boy today and he told me not to worry as my site is already backed-up with cPanel together with his other sites. So, problem solved. Nevertheless, he suggested that I continue with the ‘Export’ task that I’ve started following your advice.
Thank you so much for your kind response which is much appreciated. God bless you!
Thanks a lot for this informative content. It helped me lot. I was worried how to backup of my database.