Even less experienced users know all about the importance of backups. Data is an extremely valuable commodity these days, and we definitely don’t want to lose it, which is why we create separate copies of it and store them safely either on a physical device or in the cloud. For website owners, backups are even more critical. In fact, the entire well-being of your online project could be dependent on a working backup.
Ideally, a website will never sit still. Its owners should be on a constant quest to make it better-looking, more user-friendly, and more secure. There are a number of ways of doing this, but they hide their risks.
With every update that you apply and with every plugin that you install, you’re trying to make your website better. Unfortunately, compatibility issues and bugs often break it or, worse, bring it down. If you don’t have a working backup, you could be forced to rebuild a significant part of your website, and the downtime associated with this could threaten the existence of the entire project.
But how do you back up an entire website exactly?
There are several options. You can manually download copies of the website’s files and folders, and you can export the data from the databases. This could take a while, though, and restoring all this information could be an even bigger challenge.
If your website is powered by a content management system like WordPress, you can find backup plugins, but they’re often paid, and things like email and other projects hosted on the same account are outside their scope. At the end of the day, if your hosting account is powered by Control Panel, your best bet is to use the built-in backup utility.
Backing up an entire user account in Control Panel
Generating a full backup of your Control Panel user account takes no more than a couple of minutes. You need to log into Control Panel’s User Interface and go to Backup. If you have any backups stored on your account, you will see them in the Existing Backups list.
To create a new backup, click the Generate Backup button. Control Panel will immediately start creating copies of your files, databases, and settings. The time it will take to complete the process depends on the amount of data you’ve saved in your user account.
When it’s ready, the new backup (a tar.gz file) will be saved in the home folder of your account from where you can download it to your computer either through FTP or via Control Panel’s File Manager.