Backing up your website hosting and email data regularly is very important.
There is nothing worse than when you get the sinking feeling that comes with discovering you’ve lost all your important data. Keeping backups helps those nightmare situations and can also help in many other ways as well. Creating an easy and daily/weekly process, you’ll be able to handle problems faster and more efficiently.
This article is aimed towards readers who have a website and email hosting server and how they can implement a backup process. We are going to outline some helpful tips and processes we use to backup our own data.
Our ultimate aim is to get you on track with backing up your data and avoiding those nightmarish situations that could be right around the next corner.
Follow these helpful guides and let’s make sure you are getting the best backups of your data possible.
Table of Contents
Daily backups of your server
In this section, we are going to run through the process of using cPanel to make a full backup of your server. Once the backup is created, it is advisable to download the compressed archive to your local machine and keep a copy of it on your server.
Let’s get started!
Step 1: Login to your cPanel and in the files section select ‘Backup’.
Step 2: Within the backup screen select the ‘Download a Full Account Backup’ button. This will direct you to a new screen that will allow you to select where the backup will be saved.
Step 3: Select the destination where you would like your backup to be saved. You can enter an email address to notify you directly when an update is complete.
Step 4: Once you have entered your options, click ‘Generate Backup’ to start the backup process.
Step 5: Within the file manager, your backup file will become available for you to download and store offline.
It is advisable to take a backup before any major changes, just in case something breaks. You’ll then be able to restore your website to its last stable version.
Regular backups of your email
It isn’t often you’ll think about backing up your emails, however, it could be important to check whether it’s important that you do. We all receive a vast a mount of emails daily and it can be a job in itself to keep them organised. Keeping a backup of them cannot hurt and will help towards those times when you delete an important email by mistake.
Using the back up process previously set in this article will not only backup your website, it will back up you emails as well. Another way to backup your emails is to export them from your email clients such as: Outlook and Mac Mail. Doing so will download a copy of email account data to your local machine.
Advantages of backing up your websites
There are a lot of things you can do to keep your website safe and the most important is to keep backups of your website. The advantages of having backups is that you can roll your website back to a stable state, if it has developed a problem.
During a web development projects it can be very easy to make user error mistakes.
A lot of the time, a backup of your previous code can save the day and get you back on track.
If you are using a popular CMS like WordPress, it’s ideal to have a backup of your entire website for when the time comes to update the core files and plugins. Any incompatible themes or plugins can quickly take down your website. It is a rare occurrence but it is best to play safe and keep regular backups.
Cyber security is a huge part internet life nowadays and all websites can be vulnerable to attacks from hackers. Threats come in many shapes and forms such as Malware and planted files added to your server through weaknesses in code. By keeping backups of your data, you can delete the malicious files and roll back your server to a point they didn’t exist. This will help you clean the server of malicious files and get your website safely back up and running. It is important once the files are rolled back, to fix the areas of weak code that allowed the attack, so it doesn’t happen again.
Softaculous is a really handy tool
Softaculous is a cPanel software that allows you to add, install and manage 400+ apps. One handy solution it provides is the ability to create clones and staging sites of your CMS driven projects. It is especially good for managing WordPress.
Creating staging sites is a great way to keep a copy of your websites and will allow you to test new developments and fix problems that have occurred, without effecting your live website.
Are you using GitHub for version control?
You may already know of Github or perhaps heard of it?
GitHub is a free to use, open-source repository hosting service for storing versions of your development code. You can managed and maintain projects as a sole developer or part of a larger team.
GitHub comes with its own native app to help control your repositories/archives and it can be directly linked to your IDE (integrated development environment) such as Dreamweaver, Atom and many others.
So what does it do, how does it work?
Once GitHub up is setup for your project, it watches for any changes you’ve made to your code. Once you save your file, the native app records the changes and will make a visual comparison of the previous files content. At the end of each session of coding, you commit the changes to your ‘repo’ and the file and it’s notes will be uploaded to your GitHub project servers.
It is a great way to keep track of your projects and having the ability to document every change you have made during a project can help save you a lot of time.
Here is where to get started with GitHub:
https://github.com/
How backups can save the day!
In this article we a have talked about the importance of taking backups of your files and how they can save the day when you have discovered the loss of your data. Keeping backups can become a process that you schedule to do as you see fit.
It only takes a small amount of time to take a copy of all your data and can save you a huge amount of time and stress to be able to call on that backup whenever you need to.
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