Restoring your site from a saved backup

If you have a saved copy of your website stored on your hard drive, you may follow these instructions to restore it.

First you will need to determine what kind of backup you have, a zip file or files in a normal unzipped folder.

If your back is a zip file, you can click here for instructions to unzip your backup.

Connect to your site via FTP. Filezilla is the preferred FTP program so these screenshots are Filezilla.

On the left side of the screen you will see you'll need to navigate to the folder that you placed your back up in.

The right side of the screen is your space on the webserver. You will want to place the contents of your backup folder (left) inside the public_html folder on the webserver (right). Do not click and drag your files just yet. First you will want to see what is inside your public_html folder and you will also want to open your backup folder for viewing. 

Open your backup folder to display it contents. Open your public_html folder to display it's contents.

Select and delete the files that you wish to replace. In this example, all of the files shown in the red square below will be deleted. Hit the delete key on your keyboard. It may take several minutes to delete everything.

Now select the files and folders that you want to restore from your backup folder (left) to your public_html folder.

Click and drag the files and folders from the your backup folder to your public_html folder. This can take many minutes, depending on the upstream speed of your internet connection.

When the file transfer has completed, your sites files will be restored from your backup. If yours is a CMS site like WordPress, you will also need to restore your database. If your site uses a database, you should always back it up when you back up your sites files.

To restore your database you will first want to locate your websites config file. Wordpress sites will have a file named wp-config.php, open it for viewing or editing. You can do this using either FTP or your Webhero File ManagerWordPress. It will look like this if you are opening it using your File Manager at https://secure.webhero.com/website/filemanager. You will need your database username, your database name, your database password and the database host.

The name of the tool you will use to manage your database is 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.

Before you can import your backed up database, you'll want to clear your database of all it's existing tables. This is the part of your website that you cannot manage or restore using FTP or your Webhero FileManager. 

Click on Check All at the bottom of the screen to select every table in your Database. Using the "With selected" dropdown, select Drop. Click "Go," in the lower right side of the page.

Now you will be asked if you are sure. If you are sure, click "Yes."

Now that your database is empty, you can import your backed up .sql file. Click on Import at the top of the page then browse your computer for the sql file that you created as your database backup. You do not need to make any changes to the other options on this screen. Click the Go button at the bottom of the page. I can take several seconds for the database to import fully.

Congratulations! Your database has been restored from your back up. Occasionally, a database will be too large to import from phpMyAdmin and a error indicating that will be generated. If that does happen, just upload the database to your site via ftp and open a support ticket, we will import it for you manually.