Tutorial – Backing Up & Restoring Your Website

It's a good idea to back up your website periodically to protect against accidental file deletion, to save new versions of your site when you make changes, and to keep your website safe. To back up your website, begin by logging into your cPanel. Remember, to log into your cPanel, add /cpanel to the end of your URL. For example, if your URL is www.mysite.com, you would get to your cPanel by going to www.mysite.com/cpanel. You can then log in with your username and password (you received your cPanel username and password in your Brain Host welcome email). Once you are logged in, click on "Backup Wizard" in the "Files" box.

Next, click on "Backup."

On the next page, ignore the "Full Backup" section on the right. Instead, you will need to perform the partial backups on the left-hand side of the screen.

You can perform one, two, or all three partial backups. If you do not have any email accounts set up for your website, you only need to perform backups for your Home Directory and MySQL Databases in order to back up your site. If you do have email accounts set up for your website, you should also back up Email Forwarders & Filters. In order to perform these partial backups, simply click on one of them. For this example, we will perform a Home Directory backup. Click on "Home Directory."

On the next screen, click the "Home Directory" button.

When you click on the button you will be asked to open or save the file to your computer. Choose save.

You have now saved a backup of your website's home directory to your computer. Click on the "Go Back" button to return to the Backup screen.

You can now repeat the backup process to back up your MySQL Databases and Email Forwarders & Filters. To restore your website, return to your cPanel's home screen. You can do this from any screen you are on by clicking on the "Home" icon in the upper left-hand corner.

Once you're on the home screen click on "Backup Wizard" again in the "Files" box.

Next, click on "Restore."

Choose the part of your website that you want to restore. In this example we will restore the Home Directory. Click on "Home Directory."

Click on "Browse" and find the backup file that you saved to your computer when you backed up your Home Directory. Select the file and click "Upload."

You'll see a screen that says "Restoring Files" that looks similar to this:

Your backed up files have now been restored. To repeat the restore process for MySQL Databases and Email Forwarders & Filters, click the Home icon and start the process again. For more information about Brain Host, visit http://www.brainhost.com/.