Taking and Restoring Backups

Taking and Restoring Backups

Websites are backed up automatically, but it's worth taking your own backup right before anything risky, like a plugin update, a theme change or a migration. If something breaks, you can put everything back, or just the one file you need.

What customers can do depends on their package

Three switches on the package decide what your customers can do themselves. See Creating a Hosting Package.

• Allow backups: they can see the automatic backups
• Allow manual backups: they can take their own backups
• Allow self restore backups: they can restore files, mailboxes and whole websites without asking you

Taking a backup

1. Click Websites and click the website.
2. Click Backups along the top.
3. Click Backup now. If the site has no backups yet, the button says Create backup.
4. Add a Backup note, such as "Before WooCommerce update", so you can find it later.
5. Click Backup now.

A green message tells you when it's finished. The backup appears in the list with its date and time, its size, and a MANUAL label so you can tell it apart from the automatic ones.

Restoring the whole website

This puts every file and database back to how they were when the backup was taken.

1. On the Backups tab, find the backup you want.
2. Click Restore, then click Full website.
3. Read the warning. Anything changed on the site since that backup will be deleted and may not be recoverable, and you can't make changes to the site while the restore runs.
4. Click Restore.

Tip: if the site has had new orders, form entries or blog comments since the backup, a full restore will wipe them. Take a fresh backup of the broken site first, just in case.

Restoring just some files

1. Click Restore on the backup, then click Custom.
2. At the top, choose what you want to restore from. Files is the website's home folder, and other parts of the backup are listed alongside it when the backup includes them.
3. Browse the folders and tick the files or folders you want. Select all ticks everything in the folder you're looking at.
4. Click Restore now.

Troubleshooting

• There's no Backup now or Restore button. The package doesn't allow manual backups or self restore. Change the package, or ask us to restore it for you.
• The backup you need isn't listed. Contact us with the website and the date you need, and we'll check what's available.