Frequently Asked Questions

Back up Your Website

Print this Article
Last Updated: June 19, 2015 9:58 AM

Keeping a backup of your website is a wonderful idea. It provides insurance against all types of setbacks, such as security compromises and inadvertently deleting your entire site (it happens).

We suggest backing up your site before you make changes each and every time. That way, if something goes awry, you have a fresh copy that you know is working. It might seem like a hassle, but the first time you use a backup, you're going to pat yourself on the back for having so much foresight.

cPanel offers manually-generated backups to let you keep copies of your website's files. You can also use most of these backups as restores, returning your account's files to previous versions of themselves.

cPanel's backups are not portable to other hosting platforms.

To Backup Your cPanel Shared Hosting Account

  1. Log in to your Account Manager.
  2. Click Web Hosting.
  3. Next to the account you want to use, click Manage.
  4. In the Files section, click Backups.
  5. Click the type of backup you want to create:
    • Download or Generate a Full Website Backup — Create a backup of everything on your hosting account to store locally. You can open the TAR file it creates to extract individual files from it.

      You cannot restore your website using a Full Website Backup file.

    • Home Directory — Download a backup of all the files stored on your hosting account, including your domain names' email addresses and their emails.
    • MySQL Database Backups — Download a backup of an individual MySQL database.
    • Email Forwarders & Email Filters — Download a backup of either your your email forwarders or filters.

You can use the backup files for any of the Partial Backups as a restore, by uploading the backup file from your local machine, and then clicking Restore.

After creating a backup, you can also download it.

Restores

After backing up your hosting account, you can use the backup to restore it (more info).