What’s In Your cPanel Backup?

I cannot stress enough how important it is to have good backup copies of your website. Whether it is for recovery after a major data loss or simply to move your website to another server.

But while having a good backup is important, you must also know what’s in it so that you can restore the data. Moving your website from a cPanel web host to another is very easy as you simply upload the backup archive to the new server. But if you’re moving to a different control panel, then you’ll have to restore the files and databases manually.

How To Restore Data From a cPanel Backup

For the following tutorial, I am assuming you’ve already got a full backup downloaded to your computer.

Ok let’s start by extracting all the content from your backup archive. It’s been compressed in tar.gz format so you can uncompress it using most popular compressing tools like WinZip, WinRar or ZipGenius. Once the content is extracted, you should have a directory structure similar to this:

Restoring Files and Directories

This is the easy part: the files and directories from your website are located in /homedir/public_html. So all you need to do is to use a FTP client and upload all this stuff to your webserver.

Restoring MySQL Databases

In the mysql directory of your backup, you will find a .sql script for each of your databases. Prior to restoring your databases, you’ll first need to create them. Once you’ve got your empty databases created, use phpMyAdmin to restore the content.

Start by logging in phpMyAdmin and select the database to restore from the drop down menu on the left. Click on the Import tab at the top and use the browse button to select your .sql script.

Here are a few problems you might encounter:

The database file is too large

Some web hosts put a restriction on the maximum file size you can upload through HTTP. If this is the case, compress the .sql file in .zip format and try again.

If the file is still too large, you have only two options left: ask your hosting provider to restore the file for you or if you have SSH access, restore the database from a command line.

Incompatible format

If you’re moving from a web host to another, the MySQL server version might be different which might cause some incompatibility issue. In this case, try setting the SQL Compatibility Mode to MYSQL40 when importing the backup.

Restoring Other Content

There are plenty of other stuff to restore such as emails, cron jobs, ssl certificates, etc. And again, unless you’re moving to another cPanel web host, you’ll have to restore all of this manually. The reason being that not all web hosts have the same directory structure, the same email server, etc.

If it gets too complicated, you might need the help of your web host’s support team or you can also hire an expert.

Bookmark It