I Bet You Don’t Have Any Backup of Your Website!

June 26th, 2009 · 6 Comments

No Website Backup?When you bought a hosting plan, it said it included weekly or daily backups right? And when you saw that, you thought your data was safe right?

Well think again.

Shared hosting plans do include data backups most of the time, but what are they for? Well these backups are simply intended to restore a web server in case of hardware failure or to move your account from a server to another. Unfortunately you don’t have access to these backups and therefore you can’t restore any data from them.

So what happens if your website gets hacked for instance? You’d sure want to be able to restore your website as it was before it got hacked so that you can prevent it from happening again!

Every hosting control panels allow you to perform backups manually but this is useful only for static websites. If you have a dynamic website, like a blog or a forum, chances are visitors are posting comments or creating new threads so it’s virtually impossible to keep your backup up-to-date.

So How Can I Backup my Website Automatically?

The first step is to rent a backup space from a third party provider. I don’t like to put all my eggs in the same basket so that’s why I rather choose a different provider than my web host to store my backups.

Personally I really like using Exavault. They provide a straightforward FTP backup service at a very affordable price. Other very good FTP backup companies include DriveHQ (free basic service!), zFTP and WebNetBackup.

The second step is to get a script that will backup all your files and databases, compress them and store them on your FTP backup space. This script will then be executed automatically through CRON (Linux) or scheduled tasks manager (Windows).

Once you have the backup script working, you want to schedule daily, weekly and monthly backups so that you can restore the appropriate data when needed.

Stay tuned as I’ll show you how to backup your website automatically with cPanel and Plesk.

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6 responses so far ↓

1. Response by : Simple FTP Backup Script 0.9b Released on Jul 22, 2009 at 2:04 pm

[...] 22nd, 2009 · No Comments A couple of weeks ago, I made a post about the fact that most website owners don’t even have backup of their website. The fact is, while most web hosting companies have backup copies of their web server’s data, [...]

2. Response by : How to Backup your Website Automatically with cPanel on Jul 26, 2009 at 12:26 pm

[...] July 26th, 2009 · No Comments In my last post, I released my Simple FTP Backup Script (v0.9b). This Perl script allows you to perform a backup of your files and MySQL databases as well and upload it to a remote FTP server (read this post for some FTP backup services). [...]

3. Response by : Dimas on Sep 4, 2009 at 8:40 pm

Why building a backupscript when cpanel is doing that automatically.
And yes, you are able to open this *.tar.gz’s. And yes, all databases per user are backuped as well. So you only need to put this backups to your chosen ftp-server.

4. Response by : The Web Hosting Hero on Sep 4, 2009 at 8:47 pm

@Dimas: you can schedule backups if you have access to WHM but if you’re using shared hosting, you need to do backup manually.

The script I did is made to run automatically from a cron task.

5. Response by : Dimas on Sep 4, 2009 at 8:51 pm

Ok. But assumed the user is allowed to do cron jobs. On the other Hand, my customers can ask me all the time to provide theier backups in case of crash or they did not backups. But when user are allowed to set cron jobs, your script does good job.

6. Response by : The Web Hosting Hero on Sep 17, 2009 at 2:33 am

Cron jobs are allowed on cPanel web hosts most of the time but it’s not the case with Plesk.

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