How much are your website files worth to you?

Written on 20 January, 2015 by Michael Chidgey
Categories Web Hosting Tags small business web hosting

Are they worth 10 minutes of your time once a week? Because this is how much time it will take you to back up your cPanel website files to a local computer.  Netregistry’s cPanel infrastructure has a built in tool that enables customers to self-manage their own one-off or automated backups of their website files.

There is a support article that we recommend to customers who are interested in backing up their files read before starting the process. We point customers here because it has a large disclaimer at the start that states;

We perform our own regular backups of customer’s files; however we only keep these backups for a limited amount of time. The backups we take are for disaster recovery purposes (in case our systems fail) and, as such, individual account restorations are time consuming and costly.

We can perform individual account restorations upon request; however this service incurs additional fees and takes longer than restoring from a self-taken backup would. We recommend all customers follow the instructions below and regularly take a backup of their website files.”

The Netregistry Disaster Recovery (DR) process copies all of the cPanel instances to a secure backup location, however retrieving single client websites and files becomes tricky because these backups are used to restore a full instance of a cPanel (multiple clients) quickly so we can keep customers sites up and running. With this in mind, making your own backup of your website files is very easy and if done regularly will save you time, effort and even money.

You have a couple of options on how you can manage your cPanel backup: you can do a once of backup to the home directory or to a remote ftp site or you can schedule backups that run on a nominated time and save to a designated location.  Netregistry’s cPanel has a tool called “Backups” that lets you configure full or partial backups, backup your databases and save your email forwarders and filters. This tool should be used if you are look to take a one-off back up. You should do this regularly, however the best time to perform one is after you have finished building your website or before and after you make any major changes.

The other option you have is the “Backup Wizard”. The backup wizard can be used to schedule automatic backups, manage partial backups and restore your website files from a previous backup. Ideally you should be backing up once a week to safe location on your local computer so that in the event there are issues with your website you can quickly restore a working version of your website.

Self-managing backups will give you added confidence in making changes to your website or dealing with the ever present issue of having your website hacked. If you need more information on how to back up your website you contact our support team on (02) 9934 0501 and they can help guide you through the process. 

Looking for some help with domains, hosting, web design or digital marketing?
 

Send me marketing tips, special offers and updates