Automatic WordPress Backups – How To Backup And Restore Inside of cPanel

Backups are essential to the security of your WordPress website.

Regardless the size of your organization, you should always take backups very serious to secure your data.

At Name Hero we provide complimentary nightly backups  (one day retention) that are accessible right inside of cPanel.

Requirement For Backups

In order to be eligible of our complimentary nightly backups your WordPress website must meet the following requirements:

• Have less than 100,000 Inodes (What is an Inode?)
• Have less than 20GB overall disk usage

If these two requirements are met, your WordPress website will be automatically backed up each night with one-day data retention

We’ve build our entire infrastructure with high performance in-mind. Therefore to be able to offer a combination of high speed and redundancy, we have to place limits on account backups to keep the I/O usage on our solid state drives to a manageable level.

If we ran backups for accounts large than the above requirements it would have a severe performance impact on our servers.

In addition, we’re only able to retain one-days worth of data to keep our prices where they are.

If you want to retain more than one day’s worth of data, you’ll need to purchase our additional backup option, DropMySite.

Automatic WordPress Backups Tutorial

Complimentary WordPress Backups In cPanel

All of our customers (including our Reseller’s customers) can easily access their backups from inside of cPanel under Backup Administration:

As you can see, you have the ability to restore a single domain, database, email address, your entire home directory (all files including emails), a specific file/directory, and can check on previous restores/restores in progress.

This means you can easily restore files from the previous night’s backups without contacting our support team.  Your data is at your fingertips (as well as your customers if you’re a Reseller).

Domain Restore

For cPanels that utilize the “Add-on” domain feature, you may find yourself wanting to just restore one of the domain’s in your account (and not all).  To do this, click on the Domain Restore link and select the domain you wish to restore:
Once your domain/backup is selected click the Restore link and the process will begin.  Please note this will overwrite any existing files for that domain so proceed at your own risk.

Database Restore

If you’re running WordPress, your website two parts: files and database.

The files are where the core WordPress files are located along with your plugins, themes, and other customizations to your site’s look and feel.

The data, including your pages and posts, are inside the database.

If you need to restore this data, you can easily do so by clicking the Database Restore link:

You’ll then need to select the backup file next to the database you’re wanting to restore and click Select Database To Restore.  Just like the domain restore, the database selected will be overwritten with the file from the backup.  Please proceed doing this at your own risk.

Email Restore

If you’ve used email long enough, you know how frustrating it can be when you lose that important email and cannot recover it.

The good thing about our backup system is you can restore individual email accounts from the previous night’s backup. This is especially helpful for those with multiple people in their organization that don’t want to restore every single email in the account.

To do this, you just need to click on the Email Restore link:

Just like the above examples, you need to select the backup file next to the email address you’re wanting to restore.  When you click the Select Email To Restore link it will overwrite any emails you’ve received since the backup was taken, so also please understand this and proceed at your own risk.  There is no going back once the restore starts.

Restore My Home

If you’ve really messed up your file structure, you may find it easier to restore your entire home directory.  This means ALL files including ALL email accounts will be restored to the pervious night’s backup.

To begin you just need to click on the Restore My Home link:

As noted, this is going to restore EVERYTHING except your databases.  All domains, files, and emails inside the account.  This feature should only be used when all other restores fail to bring back your data.

It will overwrite ANY data placed in the account since the previous backup.  Once the restore begins it cannot be stopped or reverted so please understand all of the risks involved when using this restoration.

File or Directory Restore

My personal favorite feature of our backup system is the individual file or directory restore.  This feature allows you to specify just one file or directory and restore it to the previous night’s backup.

This is really helpful if you know the location of the file that was altered that you need to bring back online.

For example, your wp-content folder houses all your images/media files for WordPress.  You may just want to restore this if an image is missing from your posts/pages:

If you need to find the full path to a file or folder you can find it by going to cPanel -> File Manager. Just like the other restores, this will overwrite everything in the directory/file entered so please make sure you have the correct one before you click Restore as there is no going back!

You can monitor any of the above Restores using the Check Restore Progress. As long as there is a log file present there, the restore is still running.

Once a Restore has completed the log file will move over to the View Restore Logs link. You can download this to your computer to review the entire restore process.

DropMySite

For those that require more than one day’s worth of backup retention, we’ve integrated with DropMySite to provide automated nightly backups to their cloud.

DropMySite allows you to purchase space in bulk, starting at 5GB, and then automatically sends your website files, databases, and email accounts to their secured cloud nightly.

All of the data is instantly accessed inside of your cPanel and you’re able to retain as many days as you have space for.  5GB of space is only $1.99/per month and you can upgrade all the way up to 200GB! 

Restores are point-and-click through your web browser and you can restore an individual file or an entire website.

DropMySite Features

• Restore with 1-Click – Recovering your website very quickly is key to your business continuity and for this purpose we allow for unlimited restores and downloads from up to 30 backup versions. With the automated one-click restore feature, you can recreate your website and database with a single click.
• View Modified files – You can easily track any changes to your website files. As a website admin/ owner, you can verify that all file changes in the latest release are correct and ensure it has been backed up properly. Planning for rollbacks is also possible using this feature in association with selective restore feature.
• Download with 1-click – Our one-click download feature lets you access your backup anytime and anywhere. Website backups are available as zipped files using the tar format for easy migration to the new server. Users can select any backup version and download the backup files to recreate their website. Databases are backed up as database dump files. You can recreate your database within minutes using the MySQL friendly dump file format.
• Schedule backups – Schedule your backups on a daily, bi-weekly, weekly, fortnightly or on a monthly basis. Dropmysite provides you the flexibility to choose the appropriate time of day to start your backups. This ensures that our backup process does not affect the performance of your servers during the peak activity time of the day. Select the exact hour and time of the day when you want the backup to start and we will handle the rest. Dropmysite also provides you with the option to perform an on demand backup.
• Monitor Website Availability – Dropmysite allows you to monitor the uptime of your website and notifies you via email in the event of a server or network outage.
• Website Performance Reports – Dropmysite lets you analyze the response time (in msecs) of your website from around the world and view them graphically on a chart. You can monitor the performance of either a GET, POST or a HEAD request.
• Website Blacklist Monitor – Dropmysite has integrated Google’s Safe Browsing into our services. This way we will notify you if Google determines that your website contains suspected malware / or suspected phishing code and is deemed not safe for browsing by Google. This is integrated with website and database backup for faster recovery.
• Migrate Websites and databases – Migrating a website and its database could not have been easier now. Just create source and target profiles (website / databases) on Dropmysite and restore from source to target website / database.

How To Order / Add To Your Account

You can easily add DropMySite to your account during the order process or existing customers can add through our Client portal:

Don’t Forget To Keep Your Own Backups

With everything mentioned in this post, nothing should substitute for your own internal backups.

At the very least, you should go into cPanel -> Backups -> Download A Full Website Backup and download this to your local computer once a month.

ManageWP also has a free backup plan for one backup a month that’s automated and only takes a few minutes to setup!

You can NEVER have to many backups but you can have to little.

Feel free to comment below if you have any questions!