The best way to backup your website?

What happens if your site gets hacked tomorrow? What happens if you accidentally delete entire years worth of data? The answer is in your backups. Instead of running around wondering how to recover, you can put your mind at ease with regular backups. Backups are your responsibility, so it’s important that you have a backup plan whether it’s a brand new site or an existing site.

Manual Backups

Manual backups are tedious, but you are ensured that all your files and database data are secure. This means that you need to go to your server every day or each week and create a backup.

When you perform manual backups, you must remember to back up your files and your database. Files are the easiest. You open the location of where your web files are stored and simply take a copy. Where you store the copy is up to you, but the cloud is the best option. With cloud backups, you can protect your investment by entrusting your files with a professional rather than keeping backups local with the chance that you could lose them.

Back Up Using cPanel

If you have a LAMP setup, you probably have cPanel. cPanel is one of the most popular site dashboard applications on the market. When you log in to your hosting account, you should see the cPanel label.

In cPanel, you’ll see a “Backup” button. Once in this section, you can choose the files that you want to backup and the destination folder. This is one of the easiest ways to back up your files because it’s only a click of a button.

One downside to this method is that you are limited to storing your backups to only a certain location on your host server. This means that if something happens to your hosting contract, you lose your backups at the same time. However, it’s still a great way to create a quick backup that you can later move to a new location.

Backup to the Cloud

Cloud backups are the most secure. It’s likely that your backups will be there until you delete them. There are several options for cloud backups including Dropbox and Amazon’s web services. These cloud services let you back up and store your files indefinitely. If anything happens to your web host service or you decide to move to a new host, you still have your cloud backups to restore all files and data.

Plugins

If you have WordPress or Joomla, you can add plugins to your site that back up your files. Backup Buddy is one such plugin that makes it easy for WordPress users to back up their files without understanding what files need to be included.

Regardless of your solution, you need one or you put your site at risk. Nothing is worse than waking up and finding your entire site hacked with no solution. Backups are your primary solution should anything happen to your site that could put you out of business.

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