Although today it is extremely easy to manage a website, some bad things still can happen and interrupt your website’s normal work. For instance, your website can get hacked, crush after an update or you might simply delete important files by accident. That’s only a few things that can happen to the website.

In all the situations presented above, a single backup can save you and your website. Backups are not hard to create at all and can be really helpful. All you need to do is implement an effective backup process and make sure your backups are stored securely. Even if you won’t need them for a long time, it is still better to be safe than sorry.

First of all, you need to know some fundamental facts and basics about backup. This kind of information will help you to better understand the process.

 The Fundamentals of Website Backups

If you want your backups to actually help you, they need to fulfill the criteria provided below:

• They’re stored in more than one location.
• They’re created on a regular basis.

The best solution would be to have one backup of your website saved locally (on your computer), and one more saved on the cloud. Believe us, it does make sense to create a couple of backups in case one of them gets deleted. In case you don’t want to save backups locally, you can always create two backups, but just on different cloud storage services.

Backups are not something that you can do only once a year. If you create backups only once per year, you may as well not do it at all. The thing is you should create backups every time you update your website, it also can be really helpful to create a schedule of updates and backups just so you don’t get lost in the process. So if you always publish a lot of new content on your website, you might consider saving weekly, or maybe even daily. In case you are not posting updates frequently on your website, you might be just fine with saving once in two weeks, or even a month.

How to Back up Your Site

In this section, we are providing three methods of creating backups for the website. You don’t have to follow all three of them, and usually picking just one should be more than enough.

Method 1: Backing Up a WordPress Website with a Plugin

For WordPress websites, the best plugin to use for backups would be the UpDraftPlus plugin.

Here is how you create backups with UpDraftPlus plugin:

• Once the plugin is activated, you’ll find a new tab under Settings in your WordPress dashboard. The UpdraftPlus command center has several options, but its most important functions are plain to see: Backup Now, Restore, and Clone/Migrate.
• Clicking on Backup Now will bring up a straightforward screen including a few settings: whether to include the database and files in your backup and the option to disable the remote storage option. We recommend leaving the settings as is and clicking on the Backup Now confirmation button. Wait a minute or two (depending on the size of your site and server performance), and your backup will be ready. It’s that simple! Restoring a backup is pretty easy too, just click on Restore and select one of your backups from the list.
  • This entire process can be automated from the Settings tab. Here you can set a schedule for your file and database backups, and limit the number of copies stored at any time. This last feature prevents old backups from taking up too much space on your server or cloud storage accounts.
• You can connect your UpdraftPlus account to a cloud storage platform by selecting one from the Settings tab. Clicking on any option will display the setup instructions for that particular platform.
• Once that step is complete, you’re ready to roll. Your website will backup automatically on the schedule you’ve sent, and store copies of itself on your hosting account (which you can easily download to store a local copy) and cloud storage accounts.

Backing Up Your Website through Your Host

Depending on your web host, you might have access to a lot of different tools, however, we offer you two tools: Backup Wizard and Server Rewind. And although other hosts may not provide those exact options, in this section we are talking about how to create backups with those two tools.

As for our Backup Wizard, all you need to do is click on Backup to download a copy of your website, which you can then upload to cloud storage. There’s also a Restore option, which works with any backups you’ve created.

Server Rewind is a little less straightforward but still easy to get the hang of. It enables you to rewind your server to a former state, which we store automatically. Just pick a date from the drop-down list and click on Restore, then do the same for the Restore Databases tab, and you’re in business.

Backup Your Website Manually to Cloud Storage

Manual backup is actually not hard to perform, although it sounds like something that needs specific skills. All you need is direct access to your web server, be it via a hosting account file manager or FTP. We’re going to stick with FTP and use FileZilla and discuss how you can create a backup through those web servers.

The following steps may not be applicable for you, depending on the configurations of your web server. However, in most cases, you will need to access the public_html folder.

• Inside, you’ll find all the files that power your site.
• To backup your website files, simply download a copy of all of the files in public_html to your computer. If your website is powered by WordPress, all you really need is a copy of the wp-content directory and wp-config.php file. Those two items contain everything that makes your site unique: themes, plugins, and configuration details. The rest of the files and folders are part of every WordPress installation, so you don’t need to lug them around unless you just want to.
• Right-click and use the Download command to create copies of your selection on a local hard drive, then upload them to any cloud storage service. That’s it for your website files, but unless your site is just a set of static files you’ll still need to backup your website database. The simplest way to do this is with a database management tool such as phpMyAdmin.
• If your host provides phpMyAdmin, access the tool and go to the Export tab, then use the Quick Export method. Here, stick with SQL as the output format, and click on Go.
• You’ll download a single SQL file, which you can then upload to your cloud storage platform of choice. To prevent confusion, we recommend using an organizational system for your backups. One easy system to implement is to store each complete backup – files and database – in a new directory named with the date of the backup.

Conclusion

One of the most important things that you can do to keep your website safe is to create at least two backups with every update that you ever did. With backups, you won’t lose any information or files, plus you won’t have to worry that something will happen and you will lose everything you have on your website. So you without a question should create backups for your website or all of your websites if you have a few of them. The only thing that you need to decide on is how exactly you are going to create those backups:

• A CMS-specific solution, such as UpdraftPlus for WordPress.
• A server-side solution provided by your web host, such as our Backup Wizard and Server Rewind tools.
• A manual backup method.