Manual Backup

Video Transcript

In this class, we’re going to do a manual backup.

Now one of the main reasons that we would do a manual backup is because any automated or scheduled backup relies on different parts of what makes your website work. Things like your hosting server, the time settings of your hosting server and cron jobs, just to name a few. Now, there are times even though they are rare, but there are times when there is a problem with one or more of these pieces, and your auto backup fails, or worse, it becomes corrupted, which means you don’t know that it actually failed, it still does the backup is just that there’s some part of that particular backup, that isn’t going to work. Hopefully, you never have to restore your site.

And that corrupted backup is all these got to work with a bottom line, it’s a good idea to have a backup plan for your backup plan. That is where an occasional manual backup comes in handy. Now for me, I do a manual full backup once a month, and label it as my monthly manual backup. And I only keep two manual backups, and delete the oldest one on that third month. Now to do a manual backup, we need to be able to log into our control panel. And in this class, I’m going to again use the cPanel as my control panel. If you use a different style control panel, and cannot locate the file manager or the database manager in contact your hosting service and ask them how to access the file manager and databases, or in this case, the PHP myadmin.

So I’ve already logged into my cPanel control panel, here’s the file manager. And under databases, this is the database manager, otherwise known as PHP myadmin. Now before we get started here, you want to have some kind of organization in mind. So I’ve got a folder on my computer titled backups. Then inside of that folder, I’ve got other folders with the different years. And inside of those folders, you get it, I get the different months. So inside of January, or month one, I’ve got three files. Of course, I haven’t created these yet.

I’m getting ahead of myself here. But we will eventually have the database file the files that I’m going to compress that make up the entire WordPress folder, and a text document that contains content related to that site like the database name, database, username, database, password, and the admin login username and password for accessing the WordPress site and anything else you might want to have on that particular document. So let me show you how I got these two files. Again, let’s head on back over to our control panel under File Manager. Navigate to the location on your server where your root directory as for your WordPress site, click on Select all.

And then with everything selected, right click, and then left click on compress. I’m going to choose zip archive, you can choose whichever one you’re most comfortable with. And then scroll down a bit. And then here under the name, I’m going to change the WP dash admin dot z tip by the way this is selected. Because it’s the first item in our all selected folders and files. I’m going to change the name bu for backup. And then with the name change, be sure to keep the data tip intact. Click on compress.

And then close. Select that newly created zip file and download it to your computer right into that same folder where you got your text document at just like I’ve done here. And once that’s downloaded to your computer, you can select it and then deleted you no longer needed in here. Next up, let’s do a backup of our database. Let’s come on back into our cPanel control panel. Go into our PHP myadmin. It’s pretty simple for me because I only have the one database. But in the event you’ve got multiple databases in here, let’s go back into our file manager real quick.

So I can show you how you can figure out which database goes with this particular site. Select the WP dash config dot php file, right click, and then either edit or view. And right here is where we’ve got the name. That’s what we’re looking for. And right here it is go and select that. And with all the tables being displayed, come on up here and click on Export. The default settings are just fine. Just click on Go. And depending upon what browser you’re using will determine how this actually looks. And make sure you select save file. Click on OK. Navigate to the location on your computer where you want to save that to In my case, it’s right here. And I’ve already done that. So I’m not going to do it again. But I’m gonna go ahead and cancel this out. But that’s how you would back up your database.

So now then, let me show you how to use your backups. In case you have a corrupted database table or you are hacked or whatever the case what you want to do is rather than trying to find where that person problem is you want to get your site back up and running as soon as possible. Go back into your PHP myadmin. Come on down here and click on select or check all in this drop down, titled with selected, click on drop, you’ll get this message here saying, Are you sure you want to do this? Yep, we want to wipe everything clean. Then you want to go into import, then click on browse, navigate to the location on your computer, where you have your most recent backup of your database file. And yours, by the way, may look different depending upon what you have as your default icon for an SQL file. So if yours looks different, don’t worry about that, and just select it. And click on open and remove the sub scene, see what I’m doing here.

And then one down here and click on Go. It’s really that simple. Then click on the name of the database again, and you see everything’s populated the way that it was at the time that you did that backup for that database. And we want to do kind of the same thing for our file manager went back into our file manager, we want to pretend that we’ve just uploaded the most recent zip file backup that coincides with that database file that we just uploaded, we want to select everything with the exception of that particular zip file. And then we want to delete. So all we have in here is the backup zip file, select that and click on extract or you can right click and click on extract. You want to make sure that you are extracting it in the root directory wherever you have your or had your WordPress sites installed.

And in my case is in the public underscore HTML, click on extract and close then we can delete that zip file and we’re back in business. Now as a reminder, it’s a good idea to create a staging site. And you can use the WP vivid plugin that we covered in a previous class to create that staging site real simple. And with a staging site, you can do random test of your backups, both manual and auto generated scheduled backups. Now that’s going to bring us to the end of this class on how to do a manual backup and why you should. Thanks for checking it out and you have a great day.