How to Make a Website Backup
Making frequent backups of your account and keeping them somewhere secure is an important part of good website maintenance. In order to move your website to another hosting account, you will also need to download backups.
Free hosting accounts are not backed up or stored by ProFreeHost. It is your obligation to make backups on a regular basis and preserve them safely.
Make a backup of your website's files
The best approach to back up your website files is to use a desktop FTP client to download them.
- Connect to your account through FTP.
- Navigate to the htdocs folder of the website you are backing up.
- Save the htdocs folder to your hard drive. This is as simple as moving the htdocs directory from the right pane to the left pane in FileZilla.
If you have a huge website, the download may take a long time to finish. This is very normal. Simply begin the transfer and leave it in the background. If some of the transfers fail, simply try again until all of the files have been successfully moved.
Make a backup of your databases.
phpMyAdmin allows you to download database backups.
- Go to your account's management panel and log in.
- Select phpMyAdmin from the drop-down menu.
- Next to the database you want to download, click the Connect Now option.
- Select the Export option.
- Press the Start button to begin.
Important information about creating ZIP files on the server
Some file managers allow you to create "on the server" and extract ZIP files of your website.
The file managers, however, employ FTP, which does not permit managing archives on the destination server. This implies that the file manager creates or extracts the zip file on the file management server in the same way that you can on your own computer.
Large archives are difficult to handle with web-based file managers, and they may break while doing so.
Finally, keep in mind that free hosting has a file size restriction of 10 MB, so you might not be able to fit your full website on your account.
A word on backup scripts
Some CMS include backup capabilities built-in, while others have backup plugins. We advise against utilizing such programs.
While backup plugins appear to be simple to use, they sometimes require the execution of fairly complicated PHP code to produce backups. Due to file size constraints or PHP execution time limits, these backup scripts frequently fail, resulting in incomplete or corrupt backups. When making or restoring backups, they also put a lot of strain on the server, which might lead to other issues with your website.
