How do I create a backup of my cPanel account?

With SupportHost, all plans have automated backups included. We keep 30 daily backups of your account on an external server and give you the possibility to perform a restore in complete autonomy.

In some cases, however, it is necessary or appropriate to create a backup of your account manually. For example, before performing an upgrade of your CMS, it is recommended to create a backup. This way, if something goes wrong, you have a recent backup that can be used to restore the website as it was before the upgrade.

We offer two different ways to perform a backup:

1. take a snapshot of your account
2. make a full or partial backup of your account.

Take a snapshot of your account

This system allows you to take a "snapshot" of your account before performing the operation that could potentially cause problems to your website. Once you have created the snapshot, you can perform the various operations, and if something went wrong, you can restore the snapshot you made in a few clicks and in a simple way.

So let's see how to do it. We run the login to cPanel and scroll down to the "JETBACKUP" section by clicking on "Snapshots".

At this point, we only have one option, which is to click on the button to create a Snapshot. Please note that this type of backup is kept on your account, so you must have enough free space, or you will get an error message.

After clicking on the button to create the snapshot, we will see a confirmation message on the screen.

At this point, we can check the progress of the process through the "Queue" tool, which shows us all the processes in the queue.

As soon as the operation is entered in the queue, we will see it on "Pending". It means that the process has not yet started and will start as soon as possible.

As soon as we see the status set to "Processing", it means that the operation is in progress and the system is creating the backup of your account. The duration of this phase depends on the size of your account, and therefore on the amount of work required.

Once the operation is completed, we will see the status "Completed".

At this point, the backup is finished, and we can proceed to perform the operations on our website without worrying about something going wrong.

Restore a snapshot

If something goes wrong and your site stops working, you can perform a restore. Using this system files, databases and emails must be restored in separate ways. This allows us, for example, to restore only the files leaving the database unchanged.

Complete recovery

Jetbackup also has a full account restore function, but we have deliberately removed this option because restoring the full backup involves terminating and creating the account starting from the backup.

What happened is that many users (often in a panic) used this function with the consequence of losing vital emails, updates, and data, when they might need to restore a single file, a single database, or a single mailbox.

For example, if you have a hosting account that allows to host more than one website, you might have multiple websites. If you have a problem with one website, and you perform a full restore, it overwrites everything irreversibly. So, we often received requests for assistance (and complaints) from users who, due to lack of attention, lost data for days and blamed the backup system.

For these and other reasons, it was decided to limit access to this function so that the user can only restore what is needed.

Let's see how to individually restore files, databases, and email accounts.

File recovery

Let's go to the "File Backups" section as described in the restore files from an automatic backup tutorial. We sort by date to find the snapshots:

We must be careful that the location is a snapshot to make sure we restore our (most recent) snapshot, rather than an automatic backup.

Restore a database

Let's go to the "Database backups" section as described in our database restore from an automatic backup tutorial. Again, we sort by date to view the most recent backups at the top. Again make sure the location is a snapshot to restore just the snapshot you took before.

Restore an email account

Finally, if you want to restore one or more email accounts, you can follow the email restore from an automatic backup tutorial. Search among the available backups the one indicated as a snapshot, then proceed to restore.

Make a full or partial backup of your account

In some cases, it is convenient to use cPanel native backups to make a backup of your account, especially in those cases where you want to download a full backup of your account to transfer your account to another server.

In this case, log in to cPanel, then in the "FILE" section, click on "Backup".

From this screen, you can download a full backup or a partial backup (for example, only the home files or only a database). The interface is highly intuitive, and you can download anything you want with one click. Keep in mind that if you want to download a complete backup of your account, you must first create it, then upon receiving the confirmation email, the backup will be available for download. You can follow our two tutorials on cPanel backup and on wizard cPanel backup to see how to do it step by step.