Site Back Ups

In the event of a complete system failure we can restore all sites to the state they were in when the last back up was made. We can not however restore individual sites or files and this is where the backup systems which come with your hosting account come in useful.

As per our hosting terms and conditions, it is your responsibility to ensure you have a backup of your site. Below we've put together a simple step by step guide to help you recover your site in the event of a loss of data. Remember your site is hosted on a physical computer in a real building and no matter what precautions are taken, no one can guarantee 100% that data will not be lost, it's your site and your hard work, never depend on someone else to look after it.

Ok here goes:

Step 1

Log on to your control panel at www.yoursite.com/cpanel (replace yoursite.com with your domain name) and use the username and password given to you when your hosting account was created. If you don't know your username and password contact support for help.

Step 2

Select the Backups option (Pictured Below)

Step 3

You need to do a home directory backup. To do this click the Download home directory backup link as detailed below and choose to save the file somewhere on your computer. At this stage it's good practice to create a special backup folder on your computer that you'll be able to find in the future, should you need to restore your site, or for when you do further backups. If you have a large site or a slow internet connection this download can take quite a long time to complete, you must be sure not to interupt the download process.

Once your home directory backup is complete you will now have a compressed file stored on your computer with a backup of all files and the directory structure of your website, you can use this to restore your site in the event of future failure. The restore process is explained later.

Step 4

If your site has databases these will need to be backed up seperately as the home directory backups probably won't have a copy of them (I say probably because it is possible your site may have a database backup option, which would store a copy of the database in the home directory, however the only sure way to restore your site is to follow the steps below).

All your databases will be listed under Download a MySQL Database Backup. You'll need to download and save each database seperately by clicking on them in turn and saving them to your backup folder.

Generally the database backup will download much faster than the home directory backups and are usually completed in a few minutes, even for quite large databases.

Step 5

The final thing you need to do is download any aliases or filters you may have, these are used to restore things like your email addresses and domain forwarders, and although usually not as critical as database and home directory backups are important to do to fully restore your site. The process is similar to the database backup and it's just a matter of clicking on each one seperately and saving them to your backup folder.

That should be all the backups needed to restore your site in the event of an unrecoverable loss. The frequency of the backup is up to you, but just remebmber everything done to your site from the time of your last backup to the time of the recovery will be lost, so if your backup is 3 weeks old you'll loose 3 weeks work, 3 days old and it's 3 days work.

Ok so you have your backup, how do you restore it?

Firstly I should point out this should only be done if all else fails, backup files can become corrupted and I highly recommend you try to fix your site manaully before restoring a backup.

Restore Step 1

As above log on to your cpanel and select backup. This will take you to the cpanel backup page, the first thing you need to do is find, "Restore a Home Directory Backup" click the browse button next to it and navigate to the backup folder on your computer, select the home directory backup you want to restore. If you've saved it with the default file name when doing the backup it should look something like this
backup-yoursite.com-12-17-2006.tar.gz
with the numbers representing the date of the backup in the format mm-dd-yyyy.

Next select upload and the restore will start to upload, this can take some time and part of the way through the screen will go blank and a list of files being restored will start to scroll down the screen, again it's essential this process is not intrupted. When the Home directory is restored a message will appear on the screen.

Restore Step 2

The next thing to do is restore any databases you may have backed up, this procedure is the same as above except you find "Restore a MySQL Database" and browse to find the database you need to restore. If you have more than one database they need to be restored individually. The database backups will be named according to the type of database for example oscommerce databases are usually named something like osc1 or zen cart databases may be named zen1.

Restore Step 3

Next you need to restore the aliases and filters, to do this find "Restore an Email Domain Forwarder/Filter" browse to find the backup and upload it.

That's just about it, if you run into problems contact support, and we'll do our best to help. The procedure above will work with almost any cpanel host so even if you're not one of our customers the advice above should be ok.

By Nigel Carson
February 2007