How To Back Up Your Blog Using Cpanel

If you visit this blog frequently, you’d notice that I am missing a couple of post and comments.  This is because I accidentally deleted the database yesterday 🙁

The fortunate thing is that I did create a back up a week before I accidentally deleted the database, hence saving me the pain of loosing more than those two post and enabling me to restore the ‘almost latest’ portion on the blog.  If I didn’t do the back-up before the incident, this blog will be empty, and that would be very frustrating for me.

I started backing up my blog every now and then since my domain was hacked a year ago.  That time, I was still on the domain CDASON.COM.  While I don’t want to speculate why my blog was hacked, but that taught me a good lesson on why I should always back my files up.

For those unsure on how to do a back up when you are using CPANEL, here are some quick guidelines.

First, login into your server account.

Once you are in the control panel of CPANEL, head on to the ‘FILES’ tabs, and choose ‘Backup Wizard’.  You can also use ‘Backups’, but that is a more complicated method to make a backup, so if you are not that advance yet, stick to the wizard. Backup Wizards are normally provided for free by good web hosting companies like Data KL, ServerFreaks and Exabytes.

Once you have clicked the ‘Backup wizard’, you will then be directed to a page which gives you two choices, where you want to make a backup, or do a restoration.  You choose ‘Backup’ since this post is about making a backup for your website.

After that, you will be directed to a screen which gives you an option, whether you want to do a ‘Full Backup’, or a ‘Partial Backup’.

A ‘Full Backup’ allows you to backup all the settings and changes you have in your server, but it consumes space.  A ‘Partial Backup’ on the other hand allows you to select what you want to backup.  It saves space, but you will only backup what you want.  For instance, if you decide to do backup the MySQL Databases, then you can only restore your database in the future.  Other things like your template, and email settings will be lost if your server is hacked or attacked.  I always go for the ‘Full Backup’ option, so lets assume you will do the same.

Click on ‘Full Backup’ and you will be directed to the last stage of the whole process, which is generating your backup.  Here, you can actually choose where you would like to store the backup files, but I always prefer to keep it in my ‘Home Directory’ because I can actually download the files into my PC later.

Click on the ‘Generate Backup’ button, and you are done.  Once your backup is ready, you will receive a confirmation email on this. It’s pretty easy.  You can later log into your server, go to your home directory, and download this back-up file into your PC for safer keeping.

While doing this post, I actually just created another backup for my blog… so that’s a save for the post and comments before this 🙂

Have you backed up your data?  You really should you know.