I just had an object lesson in life management over the past week.
Last week, the web host I have had for almost 10 years apparently decided to fold up shop and skip town. Without telling any of his clients. There we were, Thursday evening before a long weekend, and suddenly all our websites go down. I try to go to the host’s website. THEIR website is down. Uh oh.
I think to myself, “Wow. Major outage. Bummer. I’ll wait until tomorrow and see if it comes back up.”
Friday morning. Everything is still down, including them. I really begin to worry. I go searching on the Internet to see if I can find any news about them. Nothing. Not a word.
Finally, about halfway through the day, a post pops up on Webhostingtalk.com. “Jatol totally down???”
Yep. From what we can tell, they did, in fact, abandon all of their customers - even those of us who had been with them for years - without a word. Panic was widespread. Fortunately, a previous employee of the host (who had left before this all happened) was on the forums, and was able to intervene with the server center the host had used and got the servers turned on for 24 hours.
Some of us were able to transfer our data over to a new host. Some people were out of town. There are a lot of people who lost clients, business and entire web sites out of this.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
So, on that happy note, I decided I would post some information useful to anyone with a website with the cPanel control panel. This is how you make a full site backup which can be used to restore your site in case of catastrophic failure, or if, say, you have to suddenly transfer to a new host.
This kind of backup cannot be used to restore things piecemeal. It’s the entire site. But trust me, it’s worth the few minutes it takes.
- Open your cPanel
- Click on Backups
- Under Full Backups, click on Generate / Download a Full Backup
- Leave all settings as is, just verify your email address is correct.
- Click on Generate Backup
- A screen will come up telling you the site is generating the backup. This may take a while depending on the size and complexity of your site. Go ahead and back out and even log out if you like.
- You will receive an email when the backup is complete.
- Return to your cPanel and click on Backups>Generate / Download a Full Backup again
- There will be a link there to a .tar.gz file. Click on it and download to your hard drive.
That’s it! You’ve now got a complete backup of your site that can be used to recreate your site. Understand that you can’t do this yourself - you have to have root access. But you can give that file to a new host for a transfer, or you can give to your current host if they have a major catastrophe or something.
Live and learn! Backup your site once a week. I sure will be, from now on!
