How Do I Backup My Website
In this article we will take take you through backing up a basic HTML/CSS website using FTP and via your Control Panel & also backing up a database driven website like Wordpress.
Backing Up A Basic HTML/CSS Website
Firstly you’ll need an FTP client. We cover FTP in another article, you can read it here (How Do I Upload My Website Via FTP). You’ll need to login using ftp.yourdomain.com.au and your FTP username and password. These usernames and passwords are the same as your Control Panel. After you have connected to your site via FTP, you will see a list of files that you have hosted on the server. You can simply select them all, right click and download them to your machine.AIA recommends you do regular backups. Doing weekly or monthly backups is good practise and can save you alot of time and possibly money. If your website is your main source of income or important to your business, protect yourself by ensuring you have a copy of everything.
Good naming conventions can be a business saver! for example, you have 6 backups of your site and they are all named various mumbo jumbo like '46_hgfdjuem.zip'. You are going to waste time trying to find out the most recent copy. You want to make sure to name the folders in date or long form i.e your-domain.com.au - backup October 2017. For even more security you can have multiple copies on your local hard disk, Google Drive/One Drive/Dropbox, and on a USB. Therefore ensuring that if your website breaks, and your computer crashes/virus, you have other cloud based copies that are still good.
Backing Up A WordPress Website
If you have a WordPress or database driven website, it will use a combination of static pages (HTML/CSS) and a database. Follow the steps above to back up the static aspect of your website and then follow the instruction on how to export your database. We use FileZilla (or any other FTP Client) to connect to the server we will use another client to connect to the database. phpMyAdmin Is generally the best an most reliable and what most, if not all database driven sites will use, and once again, it is a free download from their website. Using the external client like phpMyAdmin, you will need to know the databse name, username, and password. If you have these credentials, after connecting to the database, simply hit the 'Export' function at the top of the panel and your database will download.If you do not know what the database name, username and password are, log in to your control panel via your-domain.com.au/cpanel. Find the section labelled 'Databases' and click on phpMyAdmin. this will open the application. Now simply select the database you want to download from the left hand side (generally only one Databse will be there), then hit the 'Export' button on the top pane.
As above, it is important to match the databse with the website files you have backed up and good naming conventions are key to ensuring your files and databases are not muddled up!
