In part one of this article series I wrote about doing backups in cPanel, but that can be hard to do if you have many accounts on the same server and you have to remember to do it on a regular basis. But don’t worry because in cPanel there’s an option for the server admin too which is much easier.
Login at the WebHosting Manager (replace 2083 at the end of your cPanel URL with 2087: https://www.sampleaddress.com:2087). Scoll down to “Backups” in the left side menu:
Configure Backup
We’re going to start by setting up the backup function, so click on “Configure Backup”. Now you get a page full with “scary” options, but don’t be afraid, it’s not that hard since most options you don’t have to change at all.
Make sure you set the backup status to enabled so the backups will be done. This may be one of the more common reasons why backups was never done…..
Set the interval to Daily (yes, daily backups are a must), and make sure you have selected all weekdays. Also select weekly and monthly backups because you may need them in case you don’t notice that your site is gone the same day, or there’s something wrong with the daily backups (they may be corrupt in some way).
Now scroll down to “Backup Type” and check “Remote FTP”. Fill in your FTP server, login name and password. Make sure this FTP account is not on the same server as your other hosting accounts, because you must make sure that the backups are off server in case you lose everything on your server. If you need an extra FTP account you get for example 5Gb space at eXavier.com for only $3.40/month (a cheap “life insurance”).
When you’ve saved your changes you should login at your FTP account after about a day or so to make sure you see the backup files. If not then you’ve filled something in incorrectly like the FTP password for example.
Restore Backups
To restore backups you have several options. You can for example restore just one account or multiple accounts at the same time. Just copy the backup files you need to restore to the /home directory on your server and use the “Restore a Full Backup/cpmove file”. This option can also be used when you need to restore your account from a Full Backup done in cPanel like i wrote about in part one.
Here I’ve uploaded the backup file created in part one (you could also use one of the backup files created above) into the /home directory of the server. To restore the backup just fill in the user name of the account in the field and hit the “Restore” button. The backup file will be removed when the account has been restored so you should keep a copy of it somewhere.
The downside with restoring Full Backups from part one is that you need to have access to the server via both WHM and SSH, but that shouldn’t be any big problem. If you web hosting company is a little bit service minded they should help you with this, and if they don’t you just get a hosting account with another hosting company and send them your full backup file 🙂 .
