Backups – Expert, please, please put my mind at rest.

  • hi Guys,

    Last year my web host was attacked and all my websites were deleted. I knew nothing about web design and as my designer was abroad my business was crippled. Since then, I cannot sleep at night worried about losing my site and my business going under.

    Since then I have found the wonderful world of WordPress! I have done ok, and built a pretty decent site which helps my business with about 200 pages. If I lost this work, I’m not sure I could ever recover.

    The thing is, I am not technical at all. I have seareched websites about codex etc…I am really, really worried that the backup procedure I am following is not good enough. That if the site was deleted and I had to hire a programmer and he would tell me the backup I was doing was not good enough to fully 100% recover my site.

    Can I tell you guys what I am doing, and can you confirm this is ok and that my site is 100% safe and could be recovered or if not what more I should do!

    Please be very very gentle with me and treat me like a small child. Somebody else did my wordpress install. I can log into the CMS etc but don’t have a clue what a sql database is or an FTP editor…do you get the idea of how rubbish I am?

    Any way…here is what I am doing now…Is it 100% safe, and enough to fully restore the site EXACTLY as it is now, leaving me with ability after site resotartion to edit pages etc? Will the theme still look exactly the same?

    My website has mymag theme installed.

    Here is my current backup procedure…is it good enough???

    1) I log in to my control panel…

    2) I click on backups…

    3) I download or generate a full website backup…

    4) then after a few minutes work i donwload the file that is created which is in format 1.1.11_17-40-55website.tar.gz

    5) I download the file created and save it locally to my hard disk.

    Is this good enough? Am I 100% bullet proof against losing my site if I do this regularly? If the worst happened, and I had to restore an old version of my site, would everything work just as it does now? Site looking the same, same logins etc? some people said i should restore mysql database separately? Do I need to backup all wp settings etc as well? Thank you for keeping it simple….

    Thank you in advance for putting my mind at rest and sorry if these sound like really stupid questions…

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  • If you are using cPanel, you need to be careful about doing Full Site Backups. Quote from my cPanel:

    Note: You can only use this to move your account to another server, or to keep a local copy of your files. You cannot restore Full Backups through your cPanel interface. Find out more details on the above link.

    In the cPanel provided by my host, you must do Partial Backups if you want to restore just one part of your site with cPanel. Others may be different.

    You need to have off site backups as well. Using FTP or other way to keep a copy on your own workstation away from the host server. What if your host server get’s hacked?

    The cPanel backup is offsite – it downloads to your PC.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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