The impact on speed was noticeable, and because it took longer, site performance was bad for a while. We wish we could say the same for the larger site. Small sites have little to no impact on the speed of our website.
However, when we started to download the files from our large site (10 GB) it took quite a while longer. For our small site, we only had to access our files from the public_html folder and download them. We used the File Manager to download the site files. In fact, our only positive takeaway was that it is free.
Manual backup methods are prone to error and are time-consuming. In our opinion, backups using cPanel have a number of disadvantages. We’ll talk more about this later on in the article: File Manager for files, and phpMyAdmin for the database.
Yes, you do need 2 separate tools to backup your full site. For cPanel backups, you need access to two tools: File Manager and phpMyAdmin. To test out the tools, we created backups for three sites- small and large (10 GB), and large database (174 MB). There are usually a ton of tools on there, so it can seem a little overwhelming at first. The good news with cPanel is that most web hosts will give you access to it via your hosting account dashboard.
How to take backup of WordPress site from cPanel Not an option for large sites: Too time-consuming for large backups, and failure of restores makes cPanel backups useless for large websites. This is because your site resources are used to take these backups. Therefore, you will see your site slow down during the backup process. Impact on site performance: cPanel backups take website backups in real time. Finally, we resorted using FTP to restore the database. We can’t count the number of times database restores failed with cPanel, especially large ones. Prone to restore failures: Backups are only as good as their restores. It cannot be done daily, and anything less than daily backups means that you risk losing a lot of website changes. Manual backups are time-consuming and tedious. Manual backups are not a sustainable practice: Backups using cPanel cannot be your primary backup solution. You need to use separate tools on the dashboard to download each one’s backups, and then restore them separately as well. However, with cPanel, there is no way to download both at once. It is easy to forget these in a crunch, that is why we are talking about this first.įull backups: Both files and database are critical components without which your site will not function properly.
While this may sound great, if your website is fairly large, downloading these backups on a regular basis takes a lot of time and can take up a lot of disk space.CPanel backup and restore: Important points to rememberĪfter testing cPanel backups thoroughly, there are a few points that we need to signpost before we dive into the process.
Generating the one backup file may take longer, but it ensures you have a copy of everything in your account. Once the full backup is created in cPanel, you can then download the backup to your computer.
Creating a Full Backup of your cPanel AccountĪ full backup will create a compressed file (e.g.: /home/exampl3/backup-_10-53-25_) of your account that includes all of your files, databases, email forwarders, and any emails stored on the server. We'll start off below by showing you how to generate the full backup, and then we'll explain how to download individual backups of your files and your databases. This means that you can download backups of your database more often than downloading the full website backup, thus saving yourself time and disk space when storing the backups.
If you have software such as WordPress, your database is updated most of the time while your files generally are not changed. You can generate and download one backup file of your entire account, which includes all of your files and databases or you can create and download backups of these items individually. In cPanel, using the Backup Wizard, there are two different ways you can generate backups of your account. If your account is over 3GB in size, please see our article on using FTP to backup your site files. You can either create backups via cPanel or download files via FTP and download database backups separately (as described below). Please read our article entitled Do you Run Backups of your Servers? for more information regarding backups.īefore making any major changes to your site, it is recommended that you backup your website files and any databases used by your website.
IMPORTANT: Backing up your site is a necessary part of normal account maintenance.