How do make an entire backup of localhost

Hi,

You have to login into your cpanel and download all the files that is inside the file manager.

Hope this helps you.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by wpbees.

Please re – read my question. cPanel and other server side considerations are not in play (yet).

For now, I only want to copy my localhost install on my computer’s main drive ( c drive) to another local external backup drive (e drive in my case). I want to do this so I have a local backup now, before leveraging my hosting provider’ backup services when I go live.

There are two different aspects of your website that you need to backup:
– the first is your wordpress files, either copy the whole directory tree from your website hosting file location to your external drive, OR make a ZIP archive of the files onto th external drive.
– make a extract of your database and copy it to the external drive. The easiest way is to have “phpmyadmin” installed and use it to export an SQL formal dump of the database. If you don’t have it installed then make this an opportunity to get it.

There are other minor aspects of your website that the above will not capture, such as any changes you made to the “hosts” file or your “apache” server settings, an occasional snapshot of these is sufficient, you will know if you needed to mae any of these changes when you installed XAMPP.

@rossmitchell, thank you for this thorough answer. I’ll give it a try. I guess I don’t know enough about it or don’t remember now, but to the best of my knowledge I don’t remember doing or installing anything on my webhost server at all. At this point, I’m still 100% client side/localhost (I think).

In any case, it looks like you’ve provided all the info I would need to go ahead with my “local c to local e” backup. I’ll update this post with results either way – it worked or it didn’t. Thanks!

@rossmitchell
I was able to do a sql dump of my database using phpmyadmin no problem, result was filename.sql.

You had also said (re: backup) “the first is your wordpress files, either copy the whole directory tree from your website hosting file location to your external drive, OR make a ZIP archive of the files onto th external drive.”

Since I’m purely local (for now), I made an (overly conservative?) guess that the files you meant were in two locations:
(1) The extracted contents of the downloaded wordpress install file, wordpress-4.9.5.zip
(2) c:\xampp (entire folder)

Can you please check my assumptions, as follows:
(1) is not necessary, this is just the wordpress program install. Correct?
(2) I really only need to back up contents of c:\xampp\htdocs. Correct?

Thank you for your help ??

Comment: result was "filename.sql", to facilitate longterm management suggest that you incorporate the date into the name in the form YYYYMMDD so that they sort nicely in a list, such as “filename20180610.sql”

When I said “backup your wordpress files”, I meant the wordpress ones and not the webserver ones. The webserver can presumably be reinstalled anytime from a fresh download. So the answer is (2).
The same can be said for some of your WordPress files since you should never ever touch the files in the “wp-includes” and “wp-admin” directories.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by RossMitchell.

Understood and done. Thanks again Ross.

(resolved)