Backing up your website

Backing up and downloading your website files. 

Why back up your site?

There are several reasons you'll want to keep your website backed up. Maybe you have made changes to your site that you don't like and you can't figure out how to revert the a previous version. Maybe your site is completely broken and it would be easier to simply restore it. Maybe you handing off webmaster duties to a new person.

How to back up your website files.

There are two ways to back up site files. FTP and your Webhero Dashboard:

FTP: You will want to download an FTP program like Filezilla first. Filezilla is the program most webmasters use and we recommend it as well. Our Filezilla setup instructions are located at https://support.webhero.com/a/solutions/articles/47001111084?portalId=47000027199

Webhero Dashboard. Your dashboard will allow you to back up either individual folders or the entire home directory/public_html. 

Just log into your control panel dashboard and click Website>Backups. Your backups are stored as zip files and can me found one folder above public_html if you view them via FTP.

From there you can manage your new backup or backups that you have already created.

Your backups are stored one folder above public_html and inside a folder called backups. It might be best for you to connect to your site via FTP to download them since a full sized site could be rather large, too large for you to download using the download tool in your browser.

This is what a back up folder will look like when you connect via FTP using Filezilla. Your backups are saved inside this folder.

Once you have located the backup you want to download to your hard drive, click and drag the zip file from right to left, from the webserver to a folder on your computers hard drive. If you did not create a backup using your control panel, no problem, you can download the entire public_html folder which contains all of your files rather than one large zip file.

Backing up and restoring your websites database:

If your site was built using a 3rd party CMS platform like WordPress, you'll also need to back up your database and the tool you would use for that is called phpMyAdmin.

There are two places where your database might be stored, https://mysql.webhero.com or https://mysql56.webhero.com

You will also need your mysql login information as well as the database name that your site uses. To find this, you can either use FTP or the Webhero Filemanager.

For FTP: Connect to your site using an FTP program like Filezilla and look for a file named wp-config.php. If your site was built using a different CMS than WordPress, your config file will be located elsewhere and you should consult with the vendor to find that location. When you have located the config file, open it for editing and you will see the host, is either set to mysql.webhero.com or mysql56.webhero.com. If the host is mysql.webhero.com, you will log in at https://mysql.webhero.com, if it says mysql56.webhero.com, you will log in at https://mysql56.webhero.com.

When you open your wp-config.php file, you'll look for this section.

If you don't want to use FTP, you can view your sites config  file by logging into your Webhero Dashboard at https://secure.webhero.com.

Once you log in, click on Website.

Then select File Manager. If you running WordPress, your File Manager will look like this. Just click on the text link that says "wp-config.php." This will open the file for viewing.

Here's the information you need to access your database in phpMyAdmin.

Now that you can see your login information, open a browser tab and log into phpMyAdmin at https://mysql.webhero.com or https://mysql56.webhero.com depending on what your DB_HOST is set to.

After you log in, click on Databases.

To locate the correct database. Look at the wp-config.php file that you opened via FTP or in the Webhero FileManager. Find the line called, "define( 'DB_NAME'," It contains the name of the database that your site is using. Click on the name of the database. In this example there is only one database being stored. You might have several databases so make sure you are backing up the right one.

Clicking on the selected database will open it for viewing, editing or exporting.

Scroll to the bottom and tick the "Check All" box then use the "With Selected" dropdown to select "Export."

Select the format SQL and click "Go." Your database will, in most cases, be downloaded to your computers Downloads folder.

Congratulations. You have downloaded a copy of your website. Both files and the database that your site requires. Click here for restore instructions.