Back up your blog through Cpanel

I will now start with the technical details of doing some backups for your blog. This guide will be about generating a back up through the use of CPANEL.

This guide is useful only if you are on a paid hosting. If you are on blogger or on free wordpress then you should check out my blogger guide and my wordpress guide.

Requirements:

• Self hosted blog.
• WinRar

When you do a back up of your blog, cpanel creates a compressed file for you to download. You need winrar to open them if you want to see the contents. The compressed file has an extention of gz. So how do we back up?

First you should log on to your cpanel. I assume that you already know this, but let us say that you don’t know. You can access your panel by typing this in your browser’s address bar. I always use secure log-in when accessing my cpanel.

http://www.yourdomainname.com/scpanel

After you log-in, you will be in your cpanel. Find the section called FILES, and click on Backup.

You will now have several options. You can do the following:

Full Back up

- (Full backups can only be used for moving your account to another server or keeping a local copy of your account)

I have not tested this myself so I have no idea on how Full Back up works. If you know and would like to share it, please contact me.

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Partial Back up

I prefer to use partial back ups since there is an option to “restore” these partial back ups on the same page. What is the use of doing back ups if you are not going to use them for restoration right? Basically, you can do two types of back ups here. You can back up the home directory or back up your database. The home directory contain the files needed to run your blog such as the php files. The database contains the contents of your blog such as posts. Read my introductory post for backing up your blog for more details.

If you want to back up the home directory, just click the button. You will be downloading a file which is named like this.

backup-silkenhut.com-8-2-2007.tar.gz

Similarly, if you want to back up a database, click on the database name. The file will be…

databasename.sql.gz

There is no option to do a back up for all the databases. You have to back them up individually. You can open these files using winrar. Now, what if something wrong happens to your blog? What will you do? Naturally you want to restore them using your back ups.

Restoring your back up

Restoring your blog through cpanel is very easy. The only requirement is… you used cpanel to back it up in the first place.

You can find this screen on the same page where you made your back ups. Just upload your “back up” and you are done. Now what are you waiting for? Back up your blog before its too late. ^_^

I hope this guide has helped you. Thanks for reading.

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